The uproar engulfing the Berlinale and its director, Tricia Tuttle, now threatens to inflict lasting damage on one of the world’s essential showcases for international independent cinema.
The flashpoint, as is so often the case in cultural institutions today, is Israel-Gaza. And the arguments, as is increasingly the norm, are unfolding inside mutually exclusive media bubbles, each fortified by its own facts, its own outrage and little appetite for exchange.
At the center stands the Berlinale, one of the industry’s key platforms — alongside Cannes, Venice and Toronto — and Tuttle, who took over in 2024 after a successful term running the London Film Festival and who has tried to defend Berlin as a space for free expression and pluralistic debate.
It has not shielded her.
On Thursday, Tuttle was called in for a special meeting of the Berlinale’s supervisory board, called by German culture minister Wolfram Weimer, with the expectation among many in the media that she would be fired after controversy over pro-Palestinian speeches at Saturday’s closing gala, one of which criticized Germany as “partners in the genocide.”
German conservative tabloid Bild, citing unnamed inside sources, claimed Weimer had Tuttle in his sights because of that statement, made by Syrian-Palestinian director Abdallah al-Khatib, who won the best first feature award for his drama Chronicles From the Siege. The paper also pointed to a photograph taken earlier in the week showing Tuttle with al-Khatib’s team, several wearing keffiyehs and one holding a Palestinian flag. The standard festival photo-op now recast as evidence.
The meeting ended without a decision. In a brief statement, the German Culture Ministry — the Berlinale’s principal public funder — said only that discussions “regarding the direction of the Berlinale” would continue.
Tuttle’s future remains uncertain. She could still be removed. She could resign, leaving the ministry to manage the fallout. Or she could remain, buoyed by open letters of support from Berlinale staff and from hundreds of filmmakers around the world. If she goes, good luck finding anyone willing to take her place.
“Who would want to run the festival, knowing about the restrictions and also about the watchful eyes that would see any misstep lead to immediate execution?” German director Tom Tykwer said in a Feb. 25 television interview. “That’s not the idea of free art and a free country.”
If its loudest critics are to be believed, the Berlinale is simultaneously a platform for antisemitic, anti-Israel propaganda and an instrument of the pro-Israel German state that censors pro-Palestinian voices. Both narratives are absurd and have little relation to what actually happened at this year’s festival.
The accusations of antisemitism hinge largely on al-Khatib’s speech and the now-infamous photograph. Yet before the awards, a very different charge dominated progressive social media: that the Berlinale was silencing artists critical of Israel.
Short clips from press conferences — including jury president Wim Wenders saying, “we have to stay out of politics” — fueled online outrage. A Feb. 17 open letter signed by 81 Berlinale alumni, among them Tilda Swinton, Javier Bardem, Mark Ruffalo, and Brian Cox, accused the festival of “censoring artists who oppose Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and the German state’s key role in enabling it.”
How precisely artists were being censored was never clearly articulated. In practice, the festival stage proved anything but silent. Two days after Wenders’ statement about staying out of politics, Finnish director Hanna Bergholm wore a watermelon pin in support of Palestine at the press conference for her film Nightborn and referenced “the genocide” in Gaza. During the awards ceremony, multiple winners — including Marie-Rose Osta, whose Someday a Child won the Golden Bear for best short film, screenwriter Geneviève Dulude-de Celles (Nina Roza), and Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize winner Emin Alper (Salvation) — invoked Gaza and called to “free Palestine.”
Anyone accusing the Berlinale of anti-Israeli bias conveniently ignored the Feb. 17 launch, in Berlin, of the FutureNarrative Fund, a new German-Israeli co-production initiative attended by major public funders, broadcasters, and studios. And the Feb. 20 festival screening of A Letter to David – The Complete Version, Israeli director Tom Shoval’s documentary tribute to actor David Cunio, taken hostage by Hamas on Oct. 7 and released last November. An earlier version of the film premiered at the Berlinale last year, Tuttle’s first edition in charge.
Shoval has publicly backed Tuttle, saying she had done an “extraordinary job under impossible conditions.” So have more than 700 filmmakers from across Europe and the world, who have put their names to an open letter supporting her and calling for “artistic freedom and institutional independence” at the festival. Among the signatories are Sean Baker, Todd Haynes, Kleber Mendonça Filho, Ari Folman, Nancy Spielberg and (again) Tilda Swinton.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Shoval worried the polemics dominating this year’s Berlinale risk hollowing out the very purpose of a film festival.
“You go to a festival to see film, to see art — you’re not going to debate about politics,” he said. “Of course, films are political. Art is political. But to reduce everything to that is to create a perverse perspective.” The danger, he argued, is that the conversation consumes the cinema itself: “The Berlin Film Festival just happened, and you don’t talk about the films. You talk only about the debates.”
Throughout the festival, Tuttle rejected allegations of censorship as “rooted in misinformation” and “incredibly damaging.” At the awards ceremony, she acknowledged the charged atmosphere, but argued that the heated debate was proof that “the Berlinale is doing its job, and it’s cinema doing its job.”
Tuttle maintains that the Berlinale must remain a pluralistic space — one that allows artists to speak, audiences to listen, and disagreement to unfold without political oversight or censure. Her critics, from opposite ends of the spectrum, see bias where she sees balance.
What happens next will determine more than one director’s tenure. It will test whether one of the world’s leading film festivals can continue to function as an arena for competing voices or whether the pressure now bearing down on Berlin will redraw the limits of what can be said, and by whom.
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