Before commencing the presentation of the Competition prizes, Berlin Film Festival jury president Wim Wenders began proceedings with a prepared statement, responding to the controversy that has blighted the festival since its opening-day press conference last week, in which he contentiously declared filmmakers to be “the counterweight of politics, we are the opposite of politics.”
He amended those words in a more nuanced and conciliatory manner tonight, declaring the languages of political activists and cinema artists to be distinct but complementary. His words came notably in the middle of a ceremony that honored several overtly political films, including Perspectives winner “Chronicles From a Siege,” by Palestinian-Syrian filmmaker Abdallah Alkhatib, whose speech lambasted the German government as “partners in the genocide of Gaza by Israel, but you choose not to care.”
Wenders’ own jury, meanwhile, went on to present awards to German-Turkish director Ilker Çatak’s “Yellow Letters,” about the Turkish government’s suppression of artistic protest, and Turkish director Emin Alper’s massacre study “Salvation,” which the filmmaker expressly declared an allegory for multiple global atrocities, including recent events in Palestine and Iran.
Wenders pointedly closed his statement by quoting a speech from last year’s Berlinale by Golden Bear honoree Tilda Swinton — one of over 100 film artists to sign an open letter this week criticizing Wenders and the Berlinale for their “silence” on Palestine.
Wenders’ full statement:
“What is the common language at the Berlinale? How do we express ourselves apart from words about what we think and how we feel about the world — this beautiful, insanely complicated, terrifying, out-of-control world we live in now? It’s the language of cinema that this jury of people from seven countries had in common. It was the predominant language of the Berlinale for seven decades. It was always accompanied by the language of critics and journalists. A language of politics has also always been present, as Berlin always was, and still is, an enormously politicized place.
And since we live in the 21st century, there is the language of the internet — a quick and fast worldwide language. Lately we observe a dispute over which language should have sovereignty of interpretation at this festival. Our language, cinema, is highly differentiated, and there are as many approaches to this language as there are filmmakers, and the one you saw already before us are part of them. What the works of most filmmakers have in common is compassion. In all 22 films we saw, this was the predominant attitude, and it will reflect strongly on all films that receive an award tonight. The language of cinema is empathetic. The language of social media is effective.
We need to talk about that artificial discrepancy that happens here in Berlin. Activists are fighting mainly on the internet for humanitarian causes — namely the dignity and protection of human life. These are our causes as well. As the Berlinale films clearly show, most of us filmmakers applaud you. All of us applaud you. You do necessary and courageous work. But does it need to be in competition with ours? Do our languages need to clash?
Our tools are stories, faces, places, words, emotions. Our approaches can be critical, satirical, comical, dramatic, poetic, but will always be complex and complicated. Our most effective instrument is called in German — I love this word — “anschaul.” Difficult to translate in English: sort of a visual, sensual, existential immersion. But even if our languages are so different, we need each other: activists, friends of the suppressed, agitators against their suppressors. If we treat each other as allies, as different but complementary languages, our shared causes have a better chance to resist the ever-changing wind of consumption, of abstraction and over-saturation.
Let us not discard or under-estimate each other’s reach and possibility. Cinema is more resistant to oblivion, and certainly longer-living than the short-lived attention span that the internet offers, while our urgency — no, your urgency — reaches places our films cannot. This should not be a competition. It’s a partnership. Tilda Swinton said something beautiful in her magnificent speech receiving the Golden Bear last year: ‘Being for something has not ever, ever implied being anti anyone else.” This is something so simple that it’s always easily overlooked.”
