76th Berlin Film Festival: Queen at Sea ~ Juliette Binoche Steers Through a Storm of Memory as Lance Hammer Drops Anchor in the German Captital

French actor Juliette Binoche braves the cold on the red carpet in Berlin. Photograph (above) and cover picture of Dua Lipa by Jay Zoo for DAM

Day six of the 76th Berlin International Film Festival delivered one of the Competition’s most arresting arrivals as Queen at Sea premiered at the Berlinale Palast. Fronted by Juliette Binoche alongside Tom Courtenay and directed by Lance Hammer, the film cuts through festival glamour with bracing emotional clarity. In a week of global premieres, this London-set drama stands out for its unsentimental examination of family, care and the limits of love. Photography by Jay Zoo 

Film director Lance Hammer with actors 

Tom Courtenay, Anna Calder-Marshall

and Juliette Binoche at the official 

photocall at the Berlin Film Festival. 

ON another snowy February afternoon at the Berlinale, the competition slate was headed by the premiere of Queen at Sea. Day six of the film festival unfolded in flashes of winter light and camera bulbs as the cast gathered first for the photocall, then ascended the red carpet at the Berlinale Palast, where Europe’s first major festival of the year continues to test the emotional temperature of cinema.

At the photocall, Juliette Binoche stood composed yet quietly radiant, flanked by Tom Courtenay, Anna Calder-Marshall and rising star Florence Hunt. Their presence signalled the film’s generational sweep: three women bound by love, conflict and the slow erosion of memory. Directed by Lance Hammer, the drama marks his long-awaited return to feature filmmaking and arrives in Berlin as one of the Competition’s most emotionally rigorous entries.

The film’s generational sweep encompasses three women bound by love, conflict and the slow erosion of memory.

Florence Hunt plays Juliette 

Binoche's daughter in the film.

As evening fell, Binoche re-emerged in a sweeping silhouette with a faux-fur jacket, white shirt and pleated black trousers for the premiere, pausing for photographers against a curtain of wintry darkness. 

The mood was elegant but restrained, a fitting prelude to a film that refuses sentimentality in its portrait of dementia and familial fracture. Courtenay, ever the understated national treasure, greeted the crowd with gentle warmth, while Hunt embodied the new generation stepping into a complicated inheritance.

Inside the Palast, the audience encountered a work of bracing honesty: a story set in an atmospheric suburban London, where the director examines care, consent and the uncomfortable truths that surface when love is no longer enough. In a festival week that has stretched from the Australian outback to Depression-era America, Queen at Sea proved that the most turbulent waters are often found within the home, and that Berlin remains a harbour for cinema unafraid to confront them. ~ Jeanne-Marie Cilento

Scroll down to see the red-carpet arrivals of the cast of the Queen at Sea at the Berlin Film Festival