Berlinale Issues Statement Following Political Backlash at Festival, Says Artists Should Not Be ‘Expected to Speak on Every Political Issue’

The Berlin Film Festival has issued a lengthy statement from head Tricia Tuttle over what it describes as a “media storm” that has swept over the festival.

The note — sent out late on Saturday night — comes following criticism faced by multiple attendees over the comments about politics, most notably the jury in the opening day press conference. Faced with questions about the conflict in Gaza, jury head Wim Wenders said, “We have to stay out of politics because if we make movies that are dedicatedly political, we enter the field of politics,” prompting immediate backlash on social media. Indian author Arundhati Roy later pulled out of the festival in anger over the comments.

Both Michelle Yeoh and Neil Patrick Harris later faced online criticism for their reaction to questions about politics and the rise of facism, Harris for asserting that he was interested in “doing things that were “apolitical.”

See the full statement from Tricia Tuttle below

People have called for free speech at the Berlinale. Free speech is happening at the Berlinale. But increasingly, filmmakers are expected to answer any question put to them. They are criticised if they do not answer. They are criticised if they answer and we do not like what they say. They are criticised if they cannot compress complex thoughts into a brief sound bite when a microphone is placed in front of them when they thought they were speaking about something else.

It is hard to see the Berlinale and so many hundreds of filmmakers and people who work on this festival distilled into something we do not always recognise in the online and media discourse. Over the next ten days at the Berlinale, filmmakers are speaking constantly. They are speaking through their work. They are speaking about their work. They are speaking, at times, about geopolitics that may or may not be related to their films. It is a large, complex festival. A festival that people value in so many different ways and for so many reasons.

There are 278 films in this year’s programme. They carry many perspectives. There are films about genocide, about sexual violence in war, about corruption, about patriarchal violence, about colonialism or abusive state power. There are filmmakers here who have faced violence and genocide in their lives, who may face prison, exile, and even death for the work they have made or the positions they have taken. They come to Berlin and share their work with courage. This is happening now. Are we amplifying those voices enough?

There are also filmmakers who come to the Berlinale with different political aims: to ask how we can talk about art as art, and how we can keep cinemas alive so that independent films still have a place to be seen and discussed. In a media environment dominated by crisis, there is less oxygen left for serious conversation about film or culture at all, unless it can be folded as well into a news agenda.

Some films express a politics with a small “p”: they examine power in daily life, who and what is seen or unseen, included or excluded. Others engage with Politics with a capital “P”: governments, state policy, institutions of power and justice. This is a choice. Speaking to power happens in visible ways, and sometimes in quieter personal ones. Across the history of the Berlinale, many artists have made human rights central to their work. Others have made films which we see as quietly radical political acts which focus on small, fragile moments of care, beauty, love, or on people who are invisible to most of us, people who are alone. They help us make connections to our shared humanity through their movies. And in a broken world this is precious.

What links so many of these filmmakers at the Berlinale is a deep respect for human dignity. We do not believe there is a filmmaker screening in this festival who is indifferent to what is happening in this world, who does not take the rights, the lives and the immense suffering of people in Gaza and the West Bank, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in Sudan, in Iran, in Ukraine, in Minneapolis, and in a terrifying number of places, seriously.

Artists are free to exercise their right of free speech in whatever way they choose. Artists should not be expected to comment on all broader debates about a festival’s previous or current practices over which they have no control. Nor should they be expected to speak on every political issue raised to them unless they want to.

We continue to do this work because we love cinema but we also hope and believe watching films can change things even if that is the glacial shift of changing people, one heart or mind at a time.

We thank our team, guests, juries, our filmmakers, and the many others engaged with the Berlinale for cool heads in hot times.