Middle East crisis, Ukraine and far right combine to disrupt Berlin film festival

The most political of the big international film festivals is bracing for an even more “spicy” edition than usual, Berlinale jury president Lupita Nyong’o said, as geopolitical tensions bubbled to the surface during the opening press conference.

Berlin traditionally prides itself on its status as the most argumentative of the big three European film festivals, but this year’s event is being buffeted by multiple storms. Bloodshed in the Middle East, the rise of far right parties across Europe, as well as a war in Ukraine entering its third year, were all urgently knocking on the door as the festival’s jury introduced itself on Thursday morning.

Ukrainian writer Oksana Zabuzhko expressed hope that over the course of the 10-day festival she could “educate” her fellow jury member Albert Serra, a Catalan film-maker who has previously expressed his fascination with consensus-defying politicians Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, and appeared reluctant to retract his comments on stage.

“I think politics is more complex than saying someone is a good person or a bad person,” Serra said when pressed about a 2018 interview in which he had supposedly expressed his admiration of Putin. “You say Trump is a bad person. What changes? It’s just a statement.”

Zabuzhko, one of Ukraine’s most celebrated authors, said Serra had told her the previous evening that he had bought one of her books. “I hope he’ll educate himself a little bit,” she said.

Another member of the seven-strong jury, German auteur Christian Petzold, questioned the effectiveness of the Berlinale director’s decision to disinvite members of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party from Thursday night’s opening gala, suggesting the furore about their presence would only “make them stronger”.

“Already we’re having robust conversations,” said Nyong’o, the Oscar-winning Mexican-Kenyan actor best known for her roles in 12 Years a Slave and Black Panther. “We all have a lot of world experiences and opinion.” The next week and a half would be “interesting”, she said. “It’s probably also going to be spicy”.

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Other members of the jury, which will pick winners in seven categories from 20 films in competition, include Hong Kong director Ann Hui, Italian actor and director Jasmine Trinca and US actor and director Brady Corbet.

Political debates are a mainstay of the Berlinale, and by design. Last year Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy was invited to rally artists and film-makers with a rousing speech at the opening gala, and in the early 2010s organisers reacted to the events of the Arab spring by setting up a designated programme of films from the region. Previous mottoes have come straight out of the phrasebook of the 1968 student protest movement: “The private is political.”

The festival’s current co-directors Mariette Rissenbeek and Carlo Chatrian, running the festival for their fifth and final time, have affirmed the event’s serious-minded profile, eschewing Hollywood entertainment for more demanding fare. This year’s opening film, Small Things Like These, takes the audience back to the Magdalene Laundries abuse scandal in Ireland.

In recent weeks the festival’s directors were quick to stand up for Iranian film-makers Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha, when it became clear that they would be unable to attend the screening of their film My Favourite Cake due to a travel ban by the Iranian regime.

But in other debates the festival has struggled to position itself as decisively. A stock invitation to 100 members of the Berlin state parliament proved more controversial than in previous years, since it appeared to ask members of the Alternative für Deutschland to walk down the red carpet. Reports of a covert meeting between the far-right outfit’s politicians and neo-Nazi activists had suggested a “masterplan” of mass expulsions of migrants and non-white German citizens, sparking protests across the country.

A plea from film industry figures to disinvite AfD politicians from the opening gala was rejected by the Berlinale’s directors, before they U-turned and disinvited the politicians after all. Jury member Petzold, a 2012 Silver Bear winner for his GDR drama Barbara, seemed unimpressed with the decision.

“I think it’s not a problem to have five people from the AfD in the audience”, he said. “We are not cowards. If we can’t stand five AfD politicians, we will lose our fight.” Thousands of people who had taken to the streets against the far-right outfit were much more important, he said, and the debate about whether its politicians should be allowed to attend the festival would only “make them stronger”.

The crisis in the Middle East also looms heavily over the festival. While several films in the programme address issues underlying the conflict, the Berlinale’s directors have drawn criticism for not taking a more decisive stance.

Several films offer a starting point for a conversation about the war in Gaza, and Germany’s complicated relationship to the conflict. In German director Julia von Heinz’s Treasure, a music journalist (Lena Dunham) and her Holocaust survivor father (Stephen Fry) are confronted with his past on a trip to his native Poland. No Other Land, a documentary by a Palestinian-Israeli collective of four young activists, documents the slow-motion eradication of Palestinian villages in the West Bank, while Romanian film-maker Andrei Cohn’s Holy Week explores racism and antisemitism at the end of the 19th century.

Conversations about such fraught issues have been explicitly welcomed by Rissenbeek and Chatrian. Next to the red carpet, there will for the opening weekend be a cabin-like structure, which invites people inside to “talk about Israel and Palestine”. Some activists have dismissed this “Tiny Space” project as a fig leaf, however, designed to stop divisions spilling into the festival as a whole.

In the run-up to the festival, an anonymously organised petition called “Strike Germany” urged “international culture workers” to boycott German institutions over what it calls their “McCarthyist policies that suppress freedom of expression, specifically expressions of solidarity with Palestine”. Two film-makers subsequently announced they had withdrawn their films from the Berlinale.

Both Nyong’o and Petzold have in recent months signed open letters calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. Asked whether they would have expected a film festival as political as the Berlinale to take a stronger stance on the conflict, Petzold declined to answer, saying the jury’s job wasn’t to comment on Palestine, Ukraine or the AfD, but to debate films, which were political in their own right. He added: “How I would love to attend an apolitical film festival again in a while.”

• The Berlin international film festival starts on Thursday and runs until 25 February.