Metropolis at 100: the Berlinale’s 2027 retrospective, and the film’s two trips into the US public domain

Metropolis turns 100 in 2027, the year in which, according to the US Copyright Office, Fritz Lang set it. The Berlin International Film Festival is marking the centenary with its Retrospective, the archive section of the festival: the 77th Berlinale, which runs February 10-21, 2027, will devote it to films about the future and about rebellion. The festival announced the theme, “Rage Against the Machine,” on October 14, 2026. It says the program will have some 20 films and that the complete list will be published in December.

The films named so far

The Berlinale describes dystopias that move between the post-apocalyptic, cyberpunk and political allegory, and groups them around four focal points: urbanism, artificial intelligence, feminism and capitalism. It frames them with questions about how authoritarianism and surveillance work, and what kinds of resistance are possible. Five titles have been made public.

Rebellion links them all, the festival says: against machines, systems and artificial intelligence, against patriarchal power, and against the state, ideology and social control. Berlinale director Tricia Tuttle called the team’s approach to Lang’s film and its echoes “punk, feminist, youthful, provocative and rousing.”

The section is run by Heleen Gerritsen, artistic director of the Deutsche Kinemathek and head of the Retrospective and Berlinale Classics. This will be her second Retrospective. She says the program spans big-budget mainstream films and underground work, and that she is “particularly excited” by how the genre lets minorities imagine futures that question the systems they live in.

One hundred years after Metropolis, the focus is on directors who created their own worlds and visions of the future.

An exhibition on the same theme

The Berlinale likens the program’s range of themes to a Kinemathek exhibition, “The Metropolis Century – Dystopia and Rebellion,” which runs from March 18 to September 26, 2027, so it opens after the festival has closed. The Berlinale says the Kinemathek will also hold a series of panel discussions and networking events at the E-Werk.

The film at the center

Metropolis is a silent German science-fiction film that builds a dystopian city through special effects and design, and the Copyright Office notes that it is considered technologically advanced for its time and one of the most influential films ever made. The Office’s post illustrates it with the art-deco poster that the German artist Heinz Schulz-Neudamm created in 1926 for the film’s German premiere.

Tuttle acknowledged the difficulty of building a program around a film so familiar, asking whether there is anything new to say about “one of the most studied films of the silent era.” Her answer was the angle the Kinemathek team chose: how far Lang’s foresight reaches into later cinema and culture, through a program that, as the festival puts it, takes in American blockbusters, underground films and anime.

How Metropolis entered the US public domain twice

For American viewers, the film has a second story, which the US Copyright Office told in a post in May 2023. Paramount Famous Lasky Corp. registered Metropolis with the Office, giving August 1927 as its publication date. The film first fell into the US public domain in 1955, the Office says, because the owner did not renew the registration, which the Copyright Act of 1909 required for protection to continue.

That did not settle it. The United States joined the Berne Convention in 1989, and in 1994 Congress passed the Uruguay Round Agreements Act, which restored US protection for certain foreign works that had fallen into the US public domain while still protected in their home country. Under that law, the Office says, Metropolis had its US copyright restored in 1996. Its post lists the film among the works published in 1927 that joined the public domain on January 1, 2023, the date on which that year’s class of works enters it.

The Office adds a point that applies to any public domain work: later works based on it, such as a film adaptation or a new arrangement of music, are separate works, and their new elements can still be under copyright. Films that followed Metropolis into the public domain in 2024, 2025 and 2026 are set out in our guide to those years.

What comes next

Apart from the complete Retrospective list in December, the Berlinale’s calendar has its program press conference on January 20, 2027. The European Film Market runs February 10-16, during the festival.