Films and the programme are online

The Taxifilmfest was born out of necessity in 2023 and put together in barely six weeks. This spontaneous, chaotic and radical approach has characterised the second and now also the third edition of the Taxifilmfest.

Go to the films

Despite all this: taxi culture!

We are delighted that taxi culture is alive and thriving in difficult times. The 3rd Taxifilmfest in 2026 bears witness to this.

Since the second edition in the cold February of 2025, Berlin’s taxi industry has suffered such brutal blows that it remained unclear right up until the last minute whether there would be a third edition of the Taxifilmfest.

Meanwhile, taxi culture is struggling, fighting back and carrying on. We are showcasing young female filmmakers who are continuing to write the story of taxi culture through their films. Their mothers, fathers or grandparents built up a modest standard of living with their taxis, and the younger generation are grateful to be able to carry on this culture.

The 3rd Taxifilmfest in 2026 is all about the human element. This is just as political as the themes of 2024 and 2025.

The whole world in a taxi

“A Taxi Ride in Autumn” and “Taxitales” show how all the events of the world unfold in the driver’s seat and on the back seat of a taxi.

‘She Drives the Night’ from the Netherlands showcases the taxi as a tool for new forms of social engagement today. ‘¡TAXI!’ from New York tells the story of the ultimately successful hope for social advancement.

In the feature film ‘Taxi Warren’ from the Ivory Coast, we witness how family, politics and the police collide and shape a young man’s struggle for his future. Here, taxi culture develops as part of the rise of a society that is taking shape after over a hundred years of colonial exploitation and subsequent civil wars. Looking beyond the European horizon inspires courage and a desire for something new.

Background: Berlin’s taxi industry

The majority of Berlin’s honest taxi companies have now closed down, been sold off or gone bankrupt. Only a handful of independent taxi operators continue the tradition and the renowned quality of Berlin’s taxis. They have to make do with starvation wages and turnover that make it impossible to pay even the statutory minimum wage.

Three factors have led to this disaster.

• For decades, the regulatory body LABO has been undermining the supervision and regulation of the taxi and hire car industry. Without its failure, none of the other factors contributing to the demise of the Berlin taxi industry could have come to pass.

• For nearly 30 years, an ever-increasing number of dubious taxi companies have been putting so many vehicles on the roads that, by the time the Minimum Wage Act came into force in August 2014, the turnover required to pay the minimum wage was only being generated in exceptional cases. Since then, not even the minimum starvation wage has been achievable. Many taxi companies managed to stay afloat for a while by illegally imposing low wages on their drivers and systematically falsifying the working hours recorded on payslips.
  The drivers were unable to stop this trend because they were not unionised.

• Then came the abolition of the local knowledge test for all hire car and taxi drivers. This enabled platform companies to drive forward the ‘Uberisation’ of the business and put a huge number of poor people with no professional qualifications behind the wheel of their vehicles. They work for even less money and are instructed by criminal bosses to claim ‘income support’ from the Jobcentre using manipulated pay and working-hour records that show lower figures.
  As a result, they end up under the control of organised gangs, so-called ‘rackets’, and are kept at arm’s length from trade unions and social integration in the long term.

Wage and price dumping by ‘Uberised’ hire cars has dealt the final blow to Berlin’s taxi industry. Today, many taxi companies are in the hands of the very same sort of crooks whose support helped Uber grow in Berlin.

Since 1961, Berlin’s taxi industry had developed its own distinctive and sophisticated culture of cooperation and interaction with a wide variety of customers, a culture that had evolved over the years. At its heart was the taxi driver, who knew Berlin better than any internet platform does today, and who was on first-name terms with the worlds of politics, business and culture. This is how taxi culture develops – or something similar – all over the world, as long as a ‘chauffeur’ can support his family.

Uber’s incursion into India ruined the Indian taxi industry just as it did in Berlin at the same time. The cause and the script are always the same, everywhere. Uber, Nestlé and similar international corporations successfully transform markets into exploitative monopolies wherever social structures fail. A neoliberal Modi and a neoliberal Merz are each, in their own countries, driving the success of these mega-corporations and the impoverishment of the middle class.