Berlin’s film festival is the least glitzy of the “big three”. Where Venice and Cannes sparkle in Mediterranean sunshine, the Berlinale opened last week to a blizzard. Stars accustomed to the red-carpet treatment made do with white – the entire city was woven with snow. The guest of honour was Tilda Swinton, her ice queen-like quality, crowned with that platinum blonde quiff, more apparent than usual. For her decades-long reign over art-house cinema, she was being honoured with a much-deserved Golden Bear for lifetime achievement.
But Berlin is distinguished not just by its weather; it exists in another cultural climate, presenting films more cerebral than sensuous, more critically reflective about cinema and society, and therefore, unfailingly, more controversial. Swinton’s acceptance speech was classic Berlinale, railing against “state-perpetrated and internationally enabled mass murder”. Palestine was on her mind; she also bewailed “occupation” and “the development of riviera property”. From many dignitaries, a sharp intake of breath. Here we go again?
They had every reason to expect trouble. Last year, Germany’s unwavering support for Israel led to a cancel culture frenzy. After film-makers at Berlinale 2024 wore keffiyehs or called for ceasefires, the government placed it under investigation. Scandalously, the German culture secretary, Claudia Roth, clapped during an award given to an Israel-critical documentary made by an Israeli and a Palestinian. But all was well; Roth clarified that her applause was solely for the Israeli awardee, not – God forbid! – the Palestinian.
The furore has calmed. Swinton supports the “BDS” boycott of Israel, making her, in the official view of the German state, an anti-Semite barred from public funding. To this, politicians now turn a blind eye. Only months ago, Roth voted for a parliamentary resolution declaring the likes of Swinton anti-Semites; now she was back in the audience, with her phone out, starstruck, taking snaps of the latest bearer of the Golden Bear.
Swinton lauded the Berlin International Film Festival, to use its full name, as a “borderless realm” within “the great independent state of cinema”. Quite so. 74 countries were represented, affording me the rare pleasure of seeing on the big screen films in my mother tongue, Bengali, and my wife’s, Malayalam. If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be a Filipino maid, or to go to school in Kazakhstan, or to be performing phone sex at an erotic call centre during an earthquake in Turkey, you’ll enjoy it here. Nothing human is alien to the Berlinale.
Unfortunately, this metaphorical state exists as an enclave within a real one, Germany, that is fencing itself off. In the general election that coincided with the festival, politicians competed to prove who could shrink migration fastest. Meanwhile, inside the Berlinale bubble, Tom Tykwer’s The Light premiered, a parable about the restorative power of the migrant, in which an atomised German family is healed by their amiable new maid. She’s a refugee from Syria, and Syrian refugees top the list for what German politicians are now euphemistically calling “remigration”.
I do not advise coasting through press conferences with schoolboy German. When the respected thespian Lars Eidinger apparently proclaimed, “We live in a time of Nazism,” everyone nodded vigorously. The assertion was halfway to print before I realised the word he’d uttered was not Nazismus but Narzissmus: “narcissism”. Fixated by the far-right’s impending gains, I heard what I wanted to hear – narcissistically, you might say.
But it’s also what I was told by film-makers. The Berlinale’s best film, receiving a standing ovation, was Hysteria, which relates, with Michael Haneke-like suspense, how society can crack up, in this case over a burned Koran on a film set. Its brilliant, Tacitus-quoting director, Mehmet Büyükatalay, told me that racism is making him feel less German every day. And Burhan Qurbani, who set Richard III in Berlin’s Arab community, told me the racist looks from his youth are back. On issues such as Palestine, people are denied free expression and both directors wonder if they might have to – what is it again? – “remigrate”.
Jacob Elordi was at the premiere of his Australian miniseries The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Based on Richard Flanagan’s Booker-winning novel, this is a Second World War epic and therefore held out the disconcerting prospect of showing the Gen-Z heart-throb’s much-coveted body being blown to smithereens. This did not come to pass. In fact, director Justin Kurzel knew what an asset he had in Elordi, who pulsates through two love-making scenes in the first episode.
This isn’t gratuitous though; the show’s major theme is how love revolts against war. Elordi plays a Catullus-quoting army doctor. Featuring just as prominently as Elordi’s body is Catullus’s fifth ode to his lover. This is quoted in Thomas Campion’s influential 16th-century translation of the Roman poet, behind which there is a subtle resonance: Campion was also a doctor and soldier. At a crucial moment, Elordi’s character woos his (non-blood-related) aunt by reading the lines: “If all would lead their lives in love like me/Then bloody swords and armour should not be”. These once-famous lines were the Elizabethan version of the protest cry: make love, not war.
It was a weekend of voting; I watched on as one of the most coveted distinctions in the world was dished out. With due respect to the office of German chancellor, I am referring to the Golden Bear for Best Film. That went to the Norwegian Dreams, a revisionist romance less about the pupil-teacher affair it concerns than the politics of how to narrate it. (Again, classic Berlinale.)
I admit to feeling more decadent than I usually do at the end of one of these jamborees. The Berlinale closed to a stabbing by a Syrian refugee at the Holocaust memorial and the neo-Nazi-linked Alternative for Germany securing its best showing in a federal election – second place with a fifth of the vote – the agenda for which it set. In such a fissiparous context, even the most politically committed films, despite their makers’ pretensions, merely offer escapism; they will not change the world. We’ve all simply been dreaming away in enchanted dark rooms, snowed off from a reality we now awaken to with dismay.
[See also: How Emilia Pérez sabotaged its own Oscars campaign]
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