2 weeks ago
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February 20, 2026 — 3:00pm
In retrospect, you wonder how anyone at the Berlinale thought that this fight could be left on the international film festival’s doorstep. Last week jury chairman Wim Wenders tried to avoid questions about the festival’s failure to pronounce solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza by saying that cinema was “the opposite of politics”.
Saying that – especially now and especially in Berlin, a place defined by its political history – was bound to start a firestorm. All week, everyone, from sitcom actors to the festival organisers, has been pressed by journalists and audience members to declare their allegiances. A week, as it turned out, really is a long time in politics.
Critics were still picking over what Wenders had actually said, trying to find a spin that would be worthy of this revered elder of the German New Wave, when the first retaliatory blow hit the festival’s solar plexus.
Booker-winning author Arundhati Roy announced she wasn’t going to come to a festival where artists were not engaging with “a crime against humanity, even as it unfolds before us in real time”.
In as much time as it took to post on TikTok – funnily enough, one of the Berlinale’s sponsors – the conflict in Gaza had become the festival’s hot topic. A day later, it had expanded to include the Trump administration. No one was off the hook.
After both Michelle Yeoh (Wicked; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) and How I Met Your Mother star Neil Patrick Harris had fanned the flames by declaring that they were apolitical, festival director Tricia Tuttle moved into damage control mode.
Asked whether art should be political and if cinema could fight fascism, Harris said: “I think we live in a strangely algorithmic and divided world right now, and so as artists, I’m always interested in doing things that are apolitical. Because we’re all, as humans, wanting to connect in some way.”
Asked what she thought about ICE raids, Yeoh – who was there to receive a Golden Bear Award for her contributions to cinema – said she thought it best not to comment on something she knew so little about.
Tuttle followed up with a long statement, noting that artists faced criticism for not giving an answer or if that answer was disapproved of, and they should not be “expected to speak on every political issue raised to them unless they want to”.
The response was rapid. On Tuesday (Berlin time), an open letter of protest, signed by 81 prominent figures in the film industry, was released. All the undersigned had previously been Berlinale guests. The letter criticised the festival for “censoring artists who oppose Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and the German state’s key role in enabling it”, meaning Germany’s sale of weapons to Israel.
“Last year, filmmakers who spoke out for Palestinian life and liberty from the Berlinale stage reported being aggressively reprimanded by senior festival programmers,” the letter said. “One filmmaker was reported to have been investigated by police … We stand with our colleagues in rejecting this institutional repression and anti-Palestinian racism.” Signatories included actors Javier Bardem, Brian Cox and Tilda Swinton and directors Mike Leigh and Adam McKay.
Tuttle, who is in her second year as artistic director and is generally judged to have put together the best Berlinale in at least a decade, responded in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “I really understand the sort of pain and anger and urgency behind this letter from the signatories,” she said. “I really, really get that. But … it’s not true that we are silencing filmmakers. It’s not true that our programmers are intimidating filmmakers. In fact, the opposite.”
There is an obvious irony in the fact that so much uncomfortable equivocation is coming from a cultural sector identified with the broad liberal left; this is a debate largely between people in furious agreement.
Even Wenders’ initial provocation sits curiously at odds with his own view, cogently expressed in 1988, which has been on high rotation on social media this week. “Every film is political,” he wrote. “Most political of all are those that pretend not to be: ‘entertainment’ movies. They are the most political films there are because they dismiss the possibility of change. In every frame they tell you everything’s fine the way it is. They are a continual advertisement for things as they are.”
Another irony. There is great – and understandable – anxiety among producers, sales agents and the festival executives that this controversy has eclipsed the films themselves, diverting critical discussion and ruining what should be the filmmakers’ finest hours, seeing their films on a vast screen at one of the world’s top film festivals. But the truth is that the Berlinale has always been political. Just its position, right at the seam between the free world and the Communist bloc, ensured that its festival had a special urgency as a window between west and east.
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, as the current protesters keep pointing out, the festival has used its institutional clout to protest the imprisonment of Iranian filmmakers – even inviting Jafar Panahi to be a jury member while he was in prison for making a film without official permission – and to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russian films are not banned, but Russian institutions and delegations are.
More than any other major festival, moreover, the Berlinale has always shown politically engaged films. This year’s hottest tip for the Golden Bear is Yellow Letters, directed by Ilker Çatak, whose previous film was The Teachers’ Lounge. Shot and financed in Germany, it is a searing drama about the purging of Turkish academics and state-employed artists which left many of the country’s artists driving cabs. The director is a first-generation son of immigrants. This is exactly the kind of film we hope and expect to see in Berlin.
The festival may not have made any grand statements of solidarity with the Palestinians, but it has shown and promoted films about the Israeli occupation, including the documentary No Other Land – made by a collective of Israeli and Palestinian directors -– which went on to win an Oscar in 2025.
It was not, however, a smooth launch. When it was shown and subsequently awarded in Berlin the previous year, two of the directors gave a poignant acceptance speech that was branded “an antisemitism scandal” on the floor of the Bundestag. In that febrile atmosphere, the festival is not about to issue an institutional opinion about Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.
One reason for this prickly anxiety is not part of the current discussion, but obvious enough. There is an enduring sensitivity in Germany about the Nazi atrocities and its inherited guilt. Since the war, successive German governments have been committed to stamping out any hint of antisemitism wherever it appears. Nazi texts remain banned. Laws against antisemitic hate speech are strict. There is also a long-held consensus among older liberals – once explained to me in an interview by author Bernhard Schlink – that while Israel may deserve censure, it is not Germany’s place to deliver it. This isn’t how a younger generation thinks, but that reticence is well entrenched.
To say that cinema is antithetical to politics goes well beyond any argument about Israel and Gaza, however, even if that is the hot potato that has festival organisers worried about getting burnt. That refusal to have an opinion surely has more to do with the social media world, where every word anyone says is picked apart, scrutinised, chewed over and found to be disgusting. Saying nothing, however, doesn’t help; hate will fill that vacuum.
Which is why, perhaps, the most widely approved response to this political storm came from Rupert Grint, famous for playing Ron Weasley in the Harry Potter films. Replying to a question about the creep of fascism, Grint didn’t hesitate: “Obviously, I’m against it. But I choose my moments, when to speak … You’ll hear from me.”
By comparison, Yeoh and Harris seemed evasive in their avowed interest in finding parts that were not political; weasel words were trumped by Weasley’s words, you could say.
Surely, said the Reddit crowd, it can’t be that hard for anyone to say fascism is bad. And Berlin, riddled with bullet holes and memories, is exactly the right place to say it.
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