Berlinale review: “What kind of picture would that have been?”

2024-04-10 16:10:48

Culture Berlinale review

“What kind of picture would that have been?” Claudia Roth defends herself

As of: 6:26 p.m. | Reading time: 3 minutes

The new Berlinale director Tricia Tuttle with Claudia Roth

Quelle: picture alliance/dpa/Sebastian Gollnow

The Bundestag’s Culture Committee met to discuss the anti-Semitism debate in the context of the past Berlinale. What processing has taken place since February? Hardly any. What Claudia Roth and Tricia Tuttle are planning to do to prevent anti-Semitism.

Those present were very sorry that the Governing Mayor of Berlin, Kai Wegner, was not there. The former artistic director of the Berlinale, Carlo Chatrian, also did not accept her invitation. Present at the public meeting of the Committee for Culture and Media: State Minister Claudia Roth, the former Berlinale managing director Mariette Rissenbeek and the new Berlinale director Tricia Tuttle. People have gathered to talk about “anti-Israel and anti-Semitic incidents at the Berlinale.” What processing of the events took place between the film festival awards ceremony on February 24th and today?

The answer: hardly any. Roth points out the difference between the Berlinale as an institution and individual prize winners. The speeches of some filmmakers who expressed criticism of Israel’s actions were “not only one-sided, but also devoid of any empathy towards the Israeli victims, who were not mentioned at all.” But the Berlinale itself painted a different and more differentiated picture in the opening speeches.

Roth admits that she would have liked the presenter Hadnet Tesfai (German radio and television journalist) to have responded directly to a prize winner’s accusation of genocide on stage. However, she cannot understand the question of why she didn’t stand up herself: “What kind of picture would that have been?” if she had gone on stage and intervened? Nevertheless, she takes a clear stand: “The fact that Jews no longer feel comfortable in our country must shame us all.”

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Rissenbeek, however, does not see the question of the need for action answered quite as decisively as Roth. It wasn’t so much the course of the award ceremony that shocked her, but rather the reporting afterwards. The subsequent allegations cast the Berlinale in a light that was difficult to understand internationally.

For days they managed the difficult task of putting on such a large event in such divided times: there was a “tiny house” with space for dialogue about the Middle East conflict, which was filled from morning to evening as well as a “very good and constructive” panel on the topic of “Filmmaking in times of crisis”. When asked, she replied that the moderator of the award ceremony had been trained in advance about which statements she had to intervene in: if Israel’s right to exist was questioned, for example, in the case of calls for a ceasefire or the word “genocide”. But the balance between censorship and preventing anti-Semitism is difficult.

Tuttle, who has only been in office for seven days and still has the task of organizing her first Berlinale, did not waste many words on politics. Instead, she contented herself with platitudes about the power of films, which were supposed to be able to overcome all these problems. So we didn’t learn much new, especially the festival still owes us the answer to the question of how the anti-Semitic posts on the Berlinale Instagram account came about.