David Bowie Returns to Berlin With Immersive Event

David Bowie is coming back to Berlin.

Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker Brett Morgen (Moonage Daydream, On the Ropes) will present the world premiere of Stage, his new immersive David Bowie concert experience, at the 2027 Berlinale.

Morgen designed the immersive concert around original camera footage from Bowie’s 1978 Isolar II World Tour, which the director discovered while doing research for his 2022 documentary on Bowie, Moonage Daydream. The tour features Bowie performing material from Heroes, the landmark album he wrote and recorded while living in Berlin. Like Moonage Daydream, Stages was created with the cooperation of the David Bowie Estate. Bowie, a genre- and gender-bending icon of pop music, and one of biggest rock stars in history, died in 2016, aged 69.

Stages features a three-screen presentation combining large-scale projections of the recovered and restored footage alongside transparent LED screens and a lighting design from Patrick Woodroffe, who has lit and designed tours for everyone from ABBA and The Police to Adele and Michael Jackson. He also lit Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Stones’ concert documentary Shine a Light, which opened the Berlinale in 2006.

Paul Massey, the Academy Award-winning sound mixer of Bohemian Rhapsody (and 11-time Oscar nominee), created a special sound mix for Stages to give the audience the experience of being at the center of a live David Bowie concernt.

Stages will have its world premiere at Berlin’s Uber Arena on Feb. 14, on the first weekend of the Berlinale.

Berlinale director Tricia Tuttle called the event “a dream come true” for the festival. “The Berlinale is a place where cinema, art, and new forms of storytelling intersect,” she said. “To have this world premiere [of Stages] in Berlin, a city so closely connected to David Bowie, makes the experience especially meaningful.”

Morgen was Oscar-nominated for his 1999 boxing documentary On The Ropes and has directed several acclaimed docs, including Cobain: Montage of Heck (2015), on Kurt Cobain, the Emmy-winning Jane (2017) on the primatologist Jane Goodall, and The Kid Stays in the Picture (2002), on legendary Paramount producer Robert Evans.

Morgen will attend the Berlinale and be a headline contributor to the European Film Market’s talks program.

The 77^th Berlin International Film Festival runs Feb. 10-21, 2027.