The 76th Berlinale, the Berlin International Film Festival, which opened with a press conference in which the International Jury, headed by master director Wim Wenders, was blasted for refusing to condemn Israel, ended Saturday night with an awards ceremony in which multiple winners had harsh words about the war in Gaza.
Abdallah Al-Khatib, who won the Best Feature Debut prize for his film Chronicles From the Siege, criticized the German government, saying it was complicit in Israel’s conduct in the war against Hamas.
“People have told me to be careful… but I don’t care,” he said. “You are partners in the genocide of Gaza by Israel, but you choose not to care. Free Palestine from now until the end of the world.”
He went on to say, “I’m happy to be here to get this prize, but I’m Palestinian, so I have to use this moment to speak about Palestine. I was under a lot of pressure to participate in the Berlinale for one reason only, to stand here and say that Palestinians will be free and one day, we will have a great film festival in the middle of Gaza, in the middle of other Palestinian cities… Our festival will stand in solidarity with the people living under siege, under occupation and under dictatorships around the world. We will speak about politics before cinema. We will speak about resistance before art, about freedom before beauty, and about a human being before culture, the long-awaited day is coming.”
Given the persecution of the LGBT community in Gaza, though, it is hard to imagine the film festival Al-Khatib envisioned welcoming such movies as What Will I Become?, a movie that explores “the vulnerability of their transmasculine community” and that won the Amnesty International Award at the Berlinale.
Co-director Logan Rozos said, accepting the award, “Thank you to trans women all over the world for being the model and the blueprint for how to destabilize the patriarchy.” It would seem that the “long-awaited day” that a film like Rozos’s will be shown in Gaza will not be coming anytime soon.
Few film festival winners mention Iran
Not surprisingly, many fewer prizewinners chose to criticize the Iranian government, where numerous filmmakers have been arrested, harassed, and killed in recent weeks as they took part in recent demonstrations against the regime.
Among the few who did mention Iran was Emin Alper, whose movie, Salvation, set in the Kurdish region of Turkey, won the Grand Jury Prize. In his acceptance speech, he spoke about, “People in Iran suffering under the most terrible tyranny,” and also about “the genocide in Palestine.”
The movie that won the Golden Bear, the festival’s highest profile award, was German-Turkish filmmaker İlker Çatak's Yellow Letters, about a playwright and actress engaged in political theater in Turkey who find themselves targeted by the state.
At the awards ceremony, Wenders addressed the controversy sparked by his refusal to speak out politically at the beginning of the festival, by saying, “The language of cinema is empathetic, the language of social cinema is effective. The dignity and protection of human life - these are our causes as well. You do necessary and courageous work, but does it need to be in competition with ours? Do our voices need to clash?”
The Berlinale’s director, Tricia Tuttle, also brought up the issue at the awards ceremony, saying, “Criticism and speaking up is part of democracy, and so is disagreement. If this Berlinale has been emotionally charged, that’s not a failure of the Berlinale, and it’s not a failure of cinema. That’s the Berlinale doing its job, and that’s cinema doing its job.”