1990s Classics ‘Slackers,’ ‘Boyz n’ the Hood,’ ‘Run Lola Run’ Set for Berlinale Retrospective

The Berlin Film Festival will take a nostalgic look back at 1990s cinema with its 2026 Retrospective, set to run during the 76th Berlinale Feb. 12-22, 2026.

In an era of mega mergers and A.I. slop, when many are predicting the end of the cinema business, Berlin is inviting movie fans to remember a time when movies still felt like the future.

Under the title “Lost in the 90s”, the festival will screen 22 feature films from the decade that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall and reignited independent cinema worldwide.

Highlights of the retrospective program include 90s classics like Richard Linklater’s debut Slackers (1990), John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood (1991), Krzysztof Kieślowski’s The Double Life of Veronique (1991), and Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run (1998).

Lesser-known gems, including Spike Lee’s TV satire Bamboozled (2000) with Damon Wayans,
Ernest R. Dickerson’s Juice (1992), starring Tupac Shakur, and Jean-Luc Godard’s deconstructive dreama Germany Year 90 Nine Zero (1991) will also screen.

The Retrospective will partner with Germany’s Goethe-Institut to screen a selection of five of the films from the line-up at 150 institutes around the world, beginning in March 2026.

Berlin also announced it will premiere a digitally restored version of G. W. Pabst’s 1926 silent film classic Secrets of a Soul, at next year’s festival. The new 4K restoration of the film, made in cooperation with Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Stiftung, will screen as part of the Berlinale Classics program and be accompanied by a live performance of a new film score provided by South Korean composer Yongbom Lee and performed by Broken Frames Syndicate.

Pabst’s film, about a traumatised chemist who develops a phobia of knives and turns to a psychoanalyst for help, is considered one of the earliest examples of a movie tackling Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical theories. It’s famous for its groundbreaking use of expressionist dream sequences to visualise the unconscious on film. The live musical performance will attempt to mirror that effect using a new technology that generates electronic sounds and lights created by measuring, in real time, the brain activity of the performing violist.