A curious case of political see-saw plagued the recently concluded 74th Berlinale, one of the largest, most coveted film festivals in the world. Lupita Nyong’o, president of the International Jury—the first black woman to hold this position—began her press conference seeking to understand how “artists are responding to the world we are living in now, helping us process…”.
Process what, exactly? The world. Wary of such progressive rhetoric yanked from the therapy couch, because it is designed to make inaction look righteous, she and her jury awarded the French-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop the Golden Bear, the first black director to bag the festival’s top prize, for her documentary Dahomey, on France’s return of 26 ancient artefacts to the original owner, Benin. This was a pioneering moment not just for black representation but also for the documentary genre, which the Berlinale has been championing alongside, if not more forcefully than, fictional feature films at least over the past two Berlinales. To award “truth-making” over “fiction-making”, both genres, to be clear, being “made” or fabricated.
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The shadow of rescinding the invitations to five members of the AfD (Alternative for Germany), the far right German party, was all over that opening press conference. Director and jury member Christian Petzold thought of them as just five members in the audience, thus dismissing not just them but also the demands of their access to this space. Nyong’o, who had signed letters calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, was asked about the festival not taking a stand. Petzold took the mic, saying he preferred politics that is about “conversations” rather than “statements”, which he finds “boring”. One of the jury members, Albert Serra, in an ironic jest, called himself an admirer of Putin. There was also the Ukrainian poet Oksana Zabuzhko, who hoped Serra would read her book, translated into Italian.
Not enough
What does it mean, in the context of Nyong’o’s presidency, of Diop’s victory, to now be part of a political film festival, as the Berlinale is always considered? This is, after all, the festival that made its contempt for Trump clear; which pioneered queer cinema from the late 1970s on; introduced the Teddy Award for queer films; made acting awards gender neutral in 2021; celebrated the Arab Spring; elevated Jafar Panahi by awarding him when he was under house arrest in Iran.
When the Ukraine crisis and the Iranian crackdown began, the festival held screenings, panels, and forums. For Palestine, this year, there was only an unironically named “TinyHouse”, where over three days, around four hours each, “conversations” took place—in German—in which a maximum of six people could participate.
“In this strange, tip-toeing context, you can ask if we can expect state-funded institutions, like the Berlinale, to be truly pliable to the moral demands of a time. When your stance is tied to the state, what audacity can you sustain, after all?”
At the closing ceremony, the curators of the Berlinale’s Forum Expanded programme—one section of the Berlinale—called for a ceasefire, to a rousing reception. The official Berlinale did not comment on this despite awarding No Other Land, made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective of four young activists.
The following day the Instagram account of Berlinale Panorama—another section of the festival—was hacked with this post: “From our unresolved Nazi past to our genocidal present—we have always been on the wrong side of history. But it’s not too late to change our future.” The post demanded an immediate ceasefire, with an image of “Free Palestine: From the river to the sea”.
The Berlinale immediately deleted the post and promised “criminal charges” against those involved, later releasing a statement calling it “anti-Semitic”. This was in line with the larger German society’s ongoing inability to distinguish between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism because they do not seem to comprehend the distinction between a state’s political substrate and its religious substrate. In their imagination, the Jew is an eternal victim, and it is inconceivable to see them perpetrating the same kind of genocidal violence that they fled. As Jacqueline Rose, the psychoanalyst who, so to speak, put Israel on the therapy couch, said: “If you set up identity as victimhood, you are enthroning yourself—a licence to atrocity.”
Running behind
In this strange, tip-toeing context, you can ask if we can expect state-funded institutions, like the Berlinale, to be truly pliable to the moral demands of a time. When your stance is tied to the state, what audacity can you sustain, after all?
Italian actor Jasmine Trinca, part of the 74th Berlinale’s International Jury, wears a “Free Gaza Free Palestine” badge at the festival on February 22. | Photo Credit: Annegret Hilse/ REUTERS
To be political in a radical sense, I suppose, is not to say the things that you can get away with. It is to say the things for which you will be pulled up by the systems, the infrastructures, the power networks, for which you will have to pay. It is to be prickly, a thorn in the side.
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What the Berlinale is doing, vis-a-vis progressive politics, is merely catching up. Awarding Diop for a film that is, to be frank, quite staid and strangely comical in its decision to give the artefacts a “voice” is not the Berlinale presenting itself as a film festival that is most ahead, but one that is least behind. Stating colonialism’s ruinous appetite is not radical, and celebrating it shows how little we demand of our cultural institutions.
I suppose when culture is tied so existentially to patronage and capital and this capital is always arriving late to the political scene, given the logic of profit-maximising capitalism first and corporate social responsibility or conscience later, culture too will always be running behind the political demands people make of it. To untether culture from corporate or state patronage, like the smaller festivals do, a Kolkata People’s Film Festival, for example, is to demand a new kind of culture, one that prides itself on scratching the sores of the state’s surface hoping they will bleed.
Prathyush Parasuraman is a writer and critic who writes across publications, both print and online.
