Berlin Love

"Berlin Love" began during a winter trip that arrived at the end of a difficult year. I had traveled from Philadelphia to Berlin for the Weihnachts Film Festival, carrying both excitement and the fresh grief of losing my mother only months before. My sister, who lives in Portugal, met me there so we could spend Christmas together, and in the middle of our shared sadness, we found ourselves searching for small pockets of joy—exactly the kind our mother always taught us to notice.

The film grew out of that impulse. What started as a playful prank—stealing a friend’s Pez Santa and pairing him with the “misfit” rubber ducks my sister had brought—became a way for us to document the trip without being swallowed by grief.

Berlin and Philadelphia share a visual language of graffiti, stickers, and street art, and I wanted to use that texture to tell a story about looking for connection in unexpected places. Instead of iconic landmarks, the film lingers on overlooked corners, small gestures, and the accidental poetry of urban surfaces. In big cities, it’s often the little things—a sticker on a lamppost, whimsical wheat paste art —that spark delight. Those were the details that felt alive to me, and they became the emotional landscape of the film.

There are no human actors in "Berlin Love", no dialogue, no polished narrative arc. The film is intentionally impressionistic, capturing the sensation of wandering through a new place with your head spinning and your senses wide open. It’s a travelogue, but also a comedic meditation on loneliness, longing, and the healing that can happen when you let yourself be surprised by the world again.