David Bowie immersive concert «Stage» premieres at Berlin Film Festival
A new immersive concert experience built around restored, previously unseen David Bowie performance footage will world premiere at Berlin's Uber Arena during the Berlin Film Festival.
David Bowie is returning to Berlin, the city he called home in the mid-1970s, through a new immersive concert experience titled «Stage». The production will hold its world premiere on Feb. 14 at Uber Arena, presented in association with the Berlin Film Festival, where it will be shown during the festival's 77th edition.
The experience combines previously unseen Bowie concert footage with immersive sound and light design. Its core material is recently discovered and restored footage from the 1978 Isolar tour, which was located and prepared for the production. Rather than presenting the material as a conventional screening on a cinema screen, the project is designed to place audiences inside a live Bowie performance, with the visual and audio elements built to surround the viewer.
The project is directed by U.S. documentarian Brett Morgen, whose work has frequently focused on music and cultural history. Uber Arena, which has a capacity of 17,000, is one of the largest venues in the German capital. Staging the work in a venue of that size gives the production a scale closer to a stadium concert than to a standard film presentation, and it reflects the festival's willingness to host events that extend beyond traditional screenings.
The Berlin connection carries particular weight for Bowie's biography. He lived in the city in the mid-1970s, a period that coincided with his Berlin-era output and that is widely regarded as one of the most closely studied chapters of his career. Returning to the city with archival performance material gives longtime fans a fresh way to revisit that era alongside the 1978 tour footage.
The premiere also places the work at the intersection of cinema and live music, a space that festivals and arts institutions have increasingly embraced as audiences seek communal, large-scale experiences. For the Berlin Film Festival, the event signals an expansion of its programming into immersive formats, while for Bowie's estate and admirers it represents a new way to encounter recovered material that had remained largely out of public view. The production's reception at its premiere will indicate how archival concert footage can be reshaped for contemporary audiences in large venues.
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