Last year’s Berlinale film festival was marked by scandal. After two co-directors of the documentary No Other Land, one Palestinian and one Israeli, gave short speeches calling for equality, they were denounced by German politicians for antisemitism. A Bundestag resolution called it one of the “big antisemitism scandals” in recent years (Elon Musk’s “Roman salute,” in contrast, barely got a peep).
I do not envy Tricia Tuttle, the new head of the Berlinale, who must try to navigate between the German state’s fanatical support for Israel’s far-right government and the international art scene’s generally liberal views. There were contradictory signs like an Instagram post, nine months too late, defending No Other Land, and an FAQ informing people that the so-called antisemitism resolution was mistaken and not legally binding.
Anodyne
The resulting festival was an embarrassing mess. Germany’s public broadcaster offered a slideshow of “stars speaking out politically” that looks like a competition for anodyne messages. “HUMANITY! LOVE! VOTE!” Why did no one think to bring a sign about “DEMOCRACY”?
The only person to make an actual political statement from the stage was Tilda Swinton, who defended boycotts of Israel at a press conference. The festival leadership, in contrast, highlighted a documentary about David Cunio, who had starred in a Berlinale film in 2013 and is currently a hostage in Gaza.
In other words, they know there is a war going on, and they have chosen to focus exclusively on the side backed by German imperialism. The only film from Palestine was about parkour in Gaza City. I heard one official on stage musing about a “place that no longer exists,” as if talking about Atlantis swallowed up by the sea.
Racism and Calling the Cops
It was up to a handful of brave artists to talk about politics. Jun Li, director of Queerpanorama, read out a statement by Erfan Shkarriz, who was boycotting the festival. Berlin cops opened a criminal investigation because of the phrase “From the River to the Sea,” which multiple German courts have declared to be legal.
That is Berlinale 2025: Inviting international artists and then sticking the cops on them.
At the premiere of a documentary about the dictatorship in Paraguay, editor Manuel Embalse, who is Jewish, gave a similar speech while wearing a keffiyeh. He ended with the same slogan, used around the world as a call for equality — it has never been, despite what German prosecutors think, a unique marker of one particular Palestinian faction.
Dirk Stettner, chair of the CDU in the Berlin parliament, called for cancelling the whole festival. This would be the next logical step: banning international artists from Germany.
While the films in competition seem to have been mostly forgettable, two spectacular documentaries allowed victims of German racism to tell their stories. Das Deutsche Volk portrays the families of the nine people murdered in Hanau five years ago. They are currently being attacked by local politicians for criticizing the state.
Die Müllner Briefe features a much older mass murder: the arson attacks that killed three people in Mölln in 1992. Thousands of letters were sent to the survivors, but shockingly, the city of Mölln locked these messages of solidarity away for 27 years. They are now being presented to the public.
Yet my favorite film at the festival, Hysteria, was a satire of the German anti-racist film genre. In a film-in-the-film, a Turkish-German director is trying to commemorate yet another racist murder — the 1993 arson attack in Solingen that took five immigrants’ lives. The filmmakers want to do everything right — but one of the refugees they hire as extras is upset to see a Quran was burned for a shoot. As everyone tries to act in a principled way, the situation gets increasingly tense and absurd. Different characters who are affected by German racism — the intern with a Turkish father, the wealthy director, the different refugees — argue about who benefits from white privilege and who is making art that assuages European guilt. A morally ambivalent, hilarious masterpiece!
Under the Radar
The closest thing to an impactful statement about Germany’s complicity in genocide might have come from Radu Jude, who won a silver bear for the screenplay of Kontinental ’25. A bailiff in Cluj, a city with Romanian, Hungarian, and German traditions, evicts a poor man from the cellar where he is just barely surviving. He kills himself, and she spends the rest of the film searching for relief from the overwhelming guilt, consulting her boss, husband, priest, former student, and many other weirdos.
Like in every Jude film, the focus is on the absurdity of everyday life. The constant and casual racism against the ethnic Hungarian protagonist from the Romanian majority is one example, matched by the casual racism of ethnic Hungarians, which is funny for viewers totally unfamiliar with the stereotypes. In reminding herself that she followed the rules, she does not absolve herself, and only highlights the cheap excuses people use to do inhumane things — “I was just doing what I was told!” — German officials should watch this.
As always, Berlinale was also full of bland Hollywood slop and failed projects that will rightly never see release. The political messages were still there, but they were much harder to find than in previous years. If you boycotted the festival, you didn’t miss much.
Red Flag is a weekly column on Berlin politics that Nathaniel Flakin has been writing since 2020. After moving through different homes, it now appears every Friday at The Left Berlin.