Berlinale festival director Tricia Tuttle is asking anyone with concerns about free speech being curtailed at the upcoming event (February 13-23) to “approach us rather than make assumptions or believe things which may not be true”.
In the lead-up to her first edition in the post, Tuttle has spoken out following an online petition that has emerged, posted by Film Workers For Palestine and Strike Germany, which calls for a boycott of the 2025 festival, as well as concerns heard through the festival’s own networks from both the Arab and wider filmmaking communities about the festival and Germany’s relationship with freedom of speech.
Strike Germany posted an online statement that said: “Despite the festival’s long history of creating a space for essential political discourse, Berlinale made clear that it is content to be complicit in the German government’s ongoing strategy of aggressively censoring any criticism of Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians. As the 2025 Berlinale approaches and the indiscriminate violence in Palestine has expanded to include the bombing and displacement of the people of Lebanon, we remind film workers of where we were a year ago.”
At the 2024 ceremony, the last to be led by Mariette Rissenbeek and Carlo Chatrian and a few months after the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel and subsequent escalation of attacks on Gaza, No Other Land won the Berlinale documentary award – a Palestinian-Israeli documentary about the Israeli demolition of villages in Masafer Yatta in the West Bank.
A speech made by the film’s co-directors, Palestinian Basel Adra and Israeli Yuval Abraham, as well as views expressed by several other awardees at the ceremony in support of the plight of the Palestinian people, were deemed antisemitic by German politicians, while some Jewish filmmakers felt that the events of the Hamas October 7 attack on Israel had been overlooked.
In November, when No Other Land was released in German cinemas, the Berlin city website Berlin.de described No Other Land on its listings page as “exhibiting antisemitic tendencies”. This description has since been removed.
In response, former BFI London Film Festival director Tuttle herself posted a statement on Instagram defending the No Other Land filmmakers, writing: “I don’t consider the film, or statements made by co-directors, Palestinian Basel Adra and Israeli Yuval Abraham at the awards ceremony of the Berlinale to be anti-Semitic.”
Also in November, the German parliament passed a resolution that calls on public grants for culture and science projects to be dependent on adherence to a particular definition of antisemitism. This definition does not allow a call for a boycott of Israel, or to question Israel’s right to exist.
The resolution is legally non-binding; however, in recent years in Germany, creatives who have supported a boycott or publicly criticised Israel have seen events cancelled.
The festival receives a considerable amount of funding from the government. The 2024 edition of the Berlinale had a total budget of around €33m, with €12.6m coming from the state minister for culture and media (BKM) as well as cash injections of €2m from the Berlin Senate and almost €1m from the city’s lottery organisation.
“There are many different perspectives from individuals across different parties within the government; these have in many cases been expressed publicly and documented in the media. There have been no private directives about our artistic or curatorial choices,” Tuttle told Screen.
“The festival welcomes pluralistic views”
Tuttle is keen to promote an open discourse for all in the run-up to the next edition.
“We have had no films or filmmakers pull out of the festival so any concerns we have right now come because we are hearing, directly and through our networks, some general sense of unease and uncertainty about free speech,” she noted.
“We very much hope that people with concerns approach us rather than make assumptions or believe things which may not be true. When we speak to filmmakers directly, we find that we are able to reassure them about our commitment to free speech and the fact that the festival welcomes pluralistic views on the world, as it always has done.
“I believe there are many people who will understand that we are committed to having an inclusive and open festival.”
This includes “making sure that Israeli and Jewish filmmakers know they are welcomed at the festival”.
Tuttle confirmed that no filmmaker has so far pulled out of contention for the Berlinale in relation to this issue, and that the next edition should remain a platform in which countering perspectives can be expressed.
“The festival stands against antisemitism,” she said. ”But we also stand by filmmakers’ right to make work with strong, sometimes contested, points of view on the world, as we have done for many years. We do not avoid this work out of fear of adverse reactions. This is the main point to get across.
“When filmmakers are guests at the festival, we will also defend their right to speak openly about their work and about the impulses that underpin it. Conversely, filmmakers also have to know that some people may disagree with them, or find what they say problematic. This is also true in the context of this particular issue because of Germany’s [Holocaust] history.”
Another thorny issue that has faced Tuttle is whether members of the far-right extremist party Alternative for Germany (AfD) would be invited to the opening ceremony. Last year, the festival faced intense criticism for the invite as part of federal government and Berlin Senate quotas. After an open letter was signed by 200 industry professionals condemning the invitation, the Berlinale revoked the invitation.
Tuttle noted: “We are unlikely to issue a statement because we have never shared details of our guest lists, but we see no reason to shift the reconsidered position of the management at the last festival.
“We take suggestions for the guest list from all of our partners including our government funders. But who to invite to the Berlinale is our choice and our responsibility; we do not have to extend our hospitality to guests who are antipathetic to our values of inclusion, plurality, or those who express bigotry against Muslims or people from immigrant backgrounds.”
Tuttle has a central focus for her first edition: “I want to bring this conversation back to the films themselves, too. The Berlinale stands for cinema, all kinds of cinema.”
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