Prosecution

Faraz Shariat's first feature, Futur Drei, won the Teddy Award at the Berlinale in 2020 and established him as one of the sharper voices in a German cinema then beginning to reckon seriously with who counts as German. Staatsschutz is his follow-up, and it premiered in Panorama at the Berlinale in February 2026, where it took the section's Audience Award for best feature film. New Europe handled sales; Memento picked it up for France. It opened in German cinemas that August.

The premise is a legal thriller stripped to its most uncomfortable form. Seyo Kim, a state prosecutor played by newcomer Chen Emilie Yan, survives a racist assault and brings the case herself — confronting both the men who attacked her and a justice apparatus with a long record of looking past right-wing extremism. Julia Jentsch, a fixture of German cinema since Sophie Scholl, plays a senior colleague. Shariat shoots the procedural material coolly and lets the pressure accumulate in the gaps between what the law says it will do and what it does, with the film moving between German and Korean as Seyo's professional and family lives fail to stay separate.

Reviewers picked up on the discipline of it: Cineuropa ran both a review and a director interview, and Variety framed it as a vigilante lawyer investigating her own hate crime. The Panorama Audience Award — voted by Berlinale audiences rather than a jury — suggests the film connects as a thriller and not only as an argument, which is the harder thing for a picture built on institutional failure to manage.