Maurice Fitzpatrick writes: An Irish-produced film, Everyone Digs Bill Evans, shot in succulent monochrome, and set between New York and Florida, took the Silver Bear for Best Director at the Berlin Film Festival (Berlinale) in February this year. The film is a portrait of jazz icon Bill Evans. To my eye, the locations were perfectly recreated and captured, so much so that it was only after the premiere that I discovered that the film had been shot entirely in West Cork. It was a wholly deserving winner. However, the festival was marred by a series of controversies, which revealed that at Berlinale everybody may dig Bill Evans, but not politics.
The problems at the festival began early when an independent German journalist, Tilo Jung, asked a member of the jury on February 12th: ‘While the Berlinale has expressed clear solidarity with the war in Ukraine and the protests in Iran in the past, why does it not demonstrate similar clarity when it comes to Palestine? Considering that the festival is supported by German public funds, and that the German government strongly supports Israel in the context of Gaza, how does the jury assess this “selective human rights” approach?’ Polish producer and jury member Ewa Puszczyńska responded that there were many genocides and that the question was complicated and ‘a bit unfair’. Then jury president Wim Wenders chimed in: ‘We have to stay out of politics. We are the counterweight of politics, the opposite of politics, we have to do the work of people – not the work of politicians … Movies can change the world, not in a political way … No movie has really changed any politician’s idea.’
Really? Film histories are replete with films and investigative documentaries that probed and even corrected miscarriages of justice, challenged oppression and defended the historical record. Moreover, Berlinale has traditionally prided itself on its political engagement. It was established in 1951 as a geopolitical project of the Cold War, a US-driven cultural showcase of the ‘Free World’ intended to position West Berlin as a cultural outpost of the liberal democratic world. Those political origins became a source of the festival’s identity. As Dieter Kosslick (director of the festival from 2001–2019) stated: ‘Berlinale is political by nature.’ Wenders’s comments at any film festival would have been a travesty; at Berlinale, they undermine the festival’s self-image. In 2026, when the freedom of democracies is more threatened than at any time since the inception of the festival, the Berlinale jury president urged that filmmakers should ‘stay out of politics’. Graffiti on a wall in Berlin the following day offered this riposte: ‘Wim, du Feigling [Wim, you coward]! Film is Political.’
Amid the din it might be lost that, apart from attacking political filmmaking, this dismissal of an ‘unfair question’ was also an attack on the freedom of the press. As Orwell argued in his essay, ‘The Freedom of the Press’: ‘Journalism is printing something that someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations.’ Berlinale needs to find out fast if it is willing to unconditionally support the freedom of expression or to become a PR front for the fashion and cosmetics corporations which sponsor it.
The consequences of Wenders’s remarks were immediate. The day after, Indian author Arundhati Roy, who had been invited to the festival to present a film based on her work, withdrew in protest: ‘I heard the unconscionable statements made by members of the jury of the Berlin film festival when they were asked to comment about the genocide in Gaza. To hear them say that art should not be political is jaw‑dropping. It is a way of shutting down a conversation about a crime against humanity even as it unfolds before us in real time – when artists, writers and filmmakers should be doing everything in their power to stop it … If the greatest filmmakers and artists of our time cannot stand up and say so, they should know that history will judge them.’
A common refrain I heard in the German capital among people involved in film financing and administration was that Wenders is entitled to his opinion. So he is, and now he has to own it. That entails confronting the reality of his prescription of what filmmakers should and should not do, and the facile pose that art is separable from politics. To quote Orwell again, ‘the opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude’. Wenders has lived for eighty years, and made films during many of them, without apparently considering that proposition. For all the beauty and accomplishment of some of his films (Alice in the Cities, Paris, Texas, Perfect Days) they are rarely overtly political. He has made dozens of films and somewhere along the way he has deceived himself that this is the only way to make them.
Unwittingly, Wenders’s political innocence belies a political puritanism that the German government has been eager to defend, as the controversy, which endured throughout the festival and beyond it, demonstrated. There are few better defences for the status quo than an interdiction against engaging with the mode in which political change can be effected. The logic of Wenders’s position ends in a clampdown on dissent. When influential figures discourage political filmmaking, they reduce the chances of such films being made or receiving a fair hearing.
It was open to Berlinale’s director Tricia Tuttle to differentiate herself and the festival from the comment made by the jury president, and to unambiguously uphold the validity of filmmakers who do not want to ‘stay out of politics’. Instead, Tuttle issued a statement on February 14th laden with vague generalities, opening thus: ‘There are many different kinds of art, and many different ways of being political. Individual approaches vary greatly. People have called for free speech at the Berlinale. Free speech is happening at the Berlinale.’ Tuttle added that in ‘a media environment dominated by crisis, there is less oxygen left for serious conversation about film or culture at all’.
Surely it is the political environment more fundamentally than the media environment that is dominated by crises? And is the suggestion that crises are somehow obstacles to serious conversations about films and cultural production not merely a variant on Wenders’s comment? Now that this year’s jury members have packed their bags, the festival director and the festival will be left to reckon with those questions.
They could consider the example of Marcel Ophüls’s Le Chagrin et la Pitié (The Sorrow and the Pity), which was effectively banned from cinema distribution in France in the first two years after completion (1969-1971) – and for ten years after that on French television – owing to political pressure against its challenge to France’s WWII narrative of united resistance to Nazism. The documentary is a searing examination of wartime French collaboration with the Nazi occupation of the northern half of France. By effectively prohibiting it in the country that most needed to see it, the French government blocked serious conversations about French cultural and political identity.
The defining political battle of our time is a battle of wills. Emergent and fully-fledged autocracies alike are determined to break the will of resisters, just as resisters must steel their resolve against them. That has involved risking and giving up lives. Examples (although the estimates vary widely): the approximately 30,000 murdered by the Iranian regime in January, 75,000 people murdered by the IDF in Gaza and the almost half a million who have been killed since Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine – to pick three sickening examples. Filmmakers play a crucial role in bringing to light the threats to democracy and to humanity. This backdrop explains the anger at Wenders’s comments that filmmakers should stay out of politics.
The atmosphere in Berlin was still seething when Tuttle was called in to meet the government – upset at overt displays and protests against the genocide in Gaza. In particular, she was summoned to answer for an incident at the award ceremony. The Perspectives (Best First Feature) award this year went to Chronicles from the Siege, directed by Palestinian‑Syrian director Abdallah Al-Khatib. During his acceptance speech, Al-Khatib criticised Germany’s stance on Gaza, prompting government minister Carsten Schneider to walk out in protest. The incident quickly became the biggest controversy of the festival and Tuttle’s head was on the block.
Government commissioner for culture and the media Wolfram Weimer publicly criticised Tuttle over the festival’s handling of politically charged statements by filmmakers on the Gaza war. Weimer maintained that the festival lacked balance and had allowed inflammatory rhetoric. At the extraordinary meeting, Tuttle retained her job but accepted that an advisory board would be appointed to the festival and agreed to issue guidelines for political statements on stage. Had she retained her authority in the eyes of the filmmaking community, she could have leveraged it in that humiliating encounter (or she could have conscientiously resigned). Now the German government, which leans further right with every passing month, has the festival director it wants at the helm of Berlinale. But they should be wary of this Pyrrhic victory.
When government ministers and their officials engage with artists it should be to serve the work: providing platforms, festivals and forums for it. The moment they presume to be judges or directors of artistic creations their role becomes an affront which undermines the integrity of the work. Weimer provided a parody of that position this March when, emboldened after his Berlinale intervention, he excluded three left‑wing bookshops from consideration for the annual Deutscher Buchhandlungspreis (an independent bookshop prize), maintaining that: ‘If we distribute prizes and grants with state funds … then, in my opinion, this can’t go to enemies of the state or extremists’.
In the summer of 1947, a group of theatre companies arrived in Edinburgh with a problem: they had not been invited to perform at the newly created Edinburgh International Festival. Rather than return home, they did something brave and novel. They staged their own performances in church halls and small venues on the margins of the official programme. They were performing on the fringe and out of that impetus grew the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, which has evolved into the largest arts festival in the world. The irony is striking: the unofficial event eventually eclipsed the prestige of the curated festival that had excluded those performers in the first place. What began as a protest against cultural gatekeeping became a global institution in its own right.
That history offers an instructive lens through which to view the tensions currently emerging in Germany’s cultural landscape. History suggests that such moments of exclusion rarely produce silence. More often, they produce alternatives. The filmmaker İlker Çatak, who took the top prize, the Golden Bear, at Berlinale this year for his political drama Gelbe Briefe (Yellow Letters), has declared he would ‘never again give a film to the Berlinale’ if political interference continues. The German Film Academy has warned that attempts at political influence over the festival risk undermining one of the world’s most important cultural institutions; its open letter to the authorities concluded: ‘If every controversy leads to institutional consequences, discourse turns into control.’ These are not isolated grievances; they signal a critical moment when artists may feel they can no longer operate freely within the official structures. Artists’ openness, experientialism and unpredictability are the very qualities that often attract audiences hungry for authenticity and intellectual risk.
Indeed, the paradox of heavily curated cultural events is that their very polish can begin to feel sterile. When festivals become dominated by sponsorship deals, corporate branding and political choreography, they risk becoming less laboratories of artistic discovery and more carefully managed cultural showcases. The danger is that audiences begin to sense that the most interesting conversations are happening somewhere else. It is not difficult to imagine a similar development in Berlin. Filmmakers, writers and cultural organisers who feel politically marginalised by official cultural structures could create their own festival – The Berlin Fringe – freed from the pressures of political conformism.
Governments in genuine democracies do not control the direction of artistic life, whatever they may imagine. The fringe has a way of becoming the future. That reassertion of artistic freedom means that excluded voices of today could become tomorrow’s cultural centre, attracting audiences seeking authenticity and intellectual risk. A Berlin Fringe might surpass the increasingly Armani‑and‑Guccified, government‑curated Berlinale, demonstrating a truth the official festival risks forgetting: the most vital art does not emerge from approval, it thrives on the margins. Will Berlin permit its cultural institutions to be instruments of political expedience, or will it remember the lessons of Edinburgh and the transformative power of the fringe?