A Press Conference Gone Awry: Controversy at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival

At this year’s Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale), the first film I saw – at its Thursday evening press screening – was Gelbe Briefe (Yellow Letters), Ilker Çatak’s intriguing follow-up to his much-acclaimed, Academy-Award-nominated Das Klassenzimmer (The Teacher’s Lounge, 2023). Set entirely in Turkey (the protagonists exclusively speak Turkish), Çatak’s family (melo)drama appears to be primarily about the problems of the left-liberal Turkish intelligentsia  – focalised in the film in form of a progressive Turkish artist-couple – trying to cope with the repressive measures to which President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan subjected several thousand liberal- and left-leaning intellectuals, academics, and artists after the failed military coup against his government on July 15, 2016. Appears, because by having Berlin stand in for Ankara and Hamburg for Istanbul – the film even announces this substitution in large letters crossing the screen and never seeks to hide the Germanness of the actual shooting locations – the film cleverly undermines many Germans’ penchant for (un)wittingly operating based on a moralising attitude that consistently locates evil and wickedness elsewhere, in the exoticised “other,” while all-too-readily and unquestioningly asserting their own subject position as enlightened, fundamentally good, and morally superior.¹ “If you believe, dear German viewers,” Çatak seems to say, “that the problem is ‘those people over there,’ then you are sadly mistaken”: a Verfremdungseffekt (estrangement effect) gesture par excellence, which could easily be embraced by Aziz (Tansu Biçer), the Brechtian dramatist in whose plays his wife, Derya (Özgü Namal), performs to great acclaim until she refuses to pose for a photo with a local Erdogan-supporting politician. At that point, the prospects of this middle-aged bourgeois couple rapidly begin to deteriorate due to repressive measures – not least the prohibition to continue to perform plays that are subtly critical of Erdogan’s authoritarian regime – to which governmental forces subject them. Under duress, the couple finds that the enemy is not just “without” (i.e., Erdogan and his minions) but also within. Gradually discovering that they differ with regard to their willingness to compromise their idealism (in order to survive economically), Aziz and Derya drift emotionally apart: the latter is soon willing to do what it takes to act again (in an ideologically dubious daytime television series) to improve the family’s financial situation but also her own need for recognition, while the former, claiming to remain true to his beliefs, rapidly begins to exhibit patriarchal authoritarian tendencies.

Özgü Namal and Tansu Biçer in Yellow Letters © Ella Knorz_ifProductions_Alamode Film

The festival jury awarded Çatak’s solid but not great film (to my mind, it’s too schematic for its own good) the Golden Bear and thereby made the director the first German filmmaker to win the Berlinale’s coveted main prize since Fatih Akin – like Çatak, born to Turkish immigrants – received the trophy for Gegen die Wand (Head-On) at the 54th Berlinale in 2004. That the jury awarded Yellow Letters the Berlinale’s main prize was seen by some observers as a somewhat surprising and ironic turn of events in light of the tenor of the (controversial) remarks made by jury president Wim Wenders – one of Germany’s most accomplished filmmakers whom the festival presumably invited to serve in this capacity in honour of both his 80th birthday and his remarkable career that launched with his first feature, Summer in the Cities, in 1970 – that unfortunately (and in my view rather unnecessarily) ended up overshadowing the 76th version of the very film festival that for decades has proudly branded itself as the most political of the A-list fests. Instead of providing in the following, as I usually do, an account of several German films I saw at the festival – only parenthetically, the best were: Etwas ganz Besonderes (Home Stories), Eva Trobisch’s compelling kaleidoscopic family drama, playing in the festival’s Competition, in which the protagonists find themselves confronted with the unresolved status of their identity; Kilian Armando Friedrich’s social-realist drama Ich verstehe ihren Unmut (I Understand Your Displeasure), playing in the Panorama sidebar, in which an overworked and underpaid 59-year-old service manager at an understaffed cleaning company ethically missteps but then seeks to redeem herself in ways that evoke Ken Loach’s and the Dardenne Brothers’s films; German-Iranian director Faraz Shariat’s political thriller Staatsschutz (Prosecution), which in finest Alan Pakula-manner is staged as a tightly focused paranoia drama about a young, queer, post-migrant public prosecutor who, driving a Knight Rider-style muscle car and carrying a gun, not only stands up to the (occasionally) self-proclaimed “most objective institution in the world”  – to wit: Germany’s public prosecution service – but also exhibits, as a movie character, what it takes to counter from a left-wing perspective the many fascist-like Dirty-Harry-types that populate film history; and Austrian director Markus Schleinzer’s Competition entry Rose, a beautifully photographed black-and-white period drama set in a rural Protestant region in Prussia in the 17th century that is anchored by Sandra Hüller (winner of the Silver Bear for her brilliant performance) in a “trouser role” and that manages both to shed light on contemporary political issues by dramatising them within a past that takes on an almost legendary quality and to invite viewers to reflect on the present precisely because it does not ahistorically present the past as similar to our own time – I’d like to offer some reflections on this controversy, as I think it’s worth creating a record of how, and why, things went (in more ways than one) wrong.²

(clockwise): Home Stories © Adrian Compean, Trimafilm // I Understand Your Displeasure © Louis Dickhaut & Frederik Seeberger / WennDann Film // Prosecution © Lotta Kilian / Jünglinge Film // Rose © 2026_Schubert, ROW Pictures, Walker + Worm Film, Gerald Kerkletz

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What, then, happened?

At the jury’s opening press conference, a German YouTube journalist (Tilo Jung), whose previously established record evidences virtually no expertise in cinema, asked the jury – which, it must be noted, consisted with the exception of Wenders exclusively of non-Germans – for comments in response to a question that Jung framed “in light of the German government’s support of the genocide in Gaza and its role as the main funder of the Berlinale: do you as a member of the jury support this selective treatment of human rights?”³ After the American Berlinale artistic director, Tricia Tuttle, reminded the journalists in the room of the press conference’s primary purpose – to talk about the films – it was jury member Ewa Puszczyńska who hazarded a first, somewhat meandering reply to Jung’s question. The Polish film producer (of, inter alia, Pawel Pawlikowski’s Academy-Award-winning Ida (2013)) suggested – with reference to Wenders’ earlier comment (which he offered in response to a question by a different journalist) that “Movies can change the world, (but) not in a political way. No movie has really changed any politician’s idea, but we can change the idea that people have of how they should live”⁴ – that “films are not political in the meaning of the word I think you (meaning Tilo Jung) think is the meaning of the word. The films are, as Wim said, (…) about empathy, it’s about trying to understand, it’s about (…) making up your own mind.”⁵ Jung’s question was of course of the “gotcha” kind. Note that how he phrased his question required the jury to state whether or not it supported the German government’s “selective treatment of human rights” – a question non-German film-professionals can hardly be expected to be able to address with any real knowledge and confidence; yet the question’s subtext arguably implied the demand for the jury to reveal its own position on “the genocide in Gaza”  – a question that, in that moment, was impossible for the jury to address, since presumably the jury members had not previously discussed with each other whether they would or even should have, as the jury, a unified position. 

Tilo Jung at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival press conference

To be fair to Tilo Jung, he prefaced his question by expressing his hope to “get a quick answer from everyone,” thus inviting each of the eight people on stage (including Tuttle) to reveal their opinion. Anyone who has ever attended such press conferences knows, however, how absurd – and, frankly, narcissistic – Jung’s question was. For one, it’s simply unreasonable to expect that there would be enough time for everyone on the podium to share their view on a rather complex political situation, namely, on the German government’s position towards the situation in Gaza: whatever one’s personal position may be vis-à-vis the decades-long conflict in the Middle East, I would think it’s obvious – descriptively speaking – that there is a significant difference between the position of countries such as say, the United Kingdom, China, Brazil, South Africa, or Australia – none of which was a perpetrator of the Shoah – and Germany. In other words, regardless of one’s stand on this issue, it’s clear that for well-known historical reasons Germany’s relationship to Israel is by definition more complicated, complex, and indeed vexed, than that of any other nation. 

The International Jury 2026 (left to right) Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, Ewa Puszczyńska, Bae Doona, Wim Wenders, Min Bahadur Bham, HIKARI, Reinaldo Marcus Green. © Dirk Michael Deckbar / Berlinale 2026

This is a fact, not mere opinion – and insisting on this fact isn’t to suggest that Germany’s position, whatever it may be, is a “good” one (in whichever sense) but simply to acknowledge the reality of the historical circumstances that we do not get to choose. Which is precisely why the very idea that anyone, let alone everyone, on stage at the opening Berlinale press conference would want to offer a simple “yes” or “no” answer  – as the rhetoric of Jung’s question demanded – is so obviously ludicrous that the sheer utterance thereof casts significant doubt on Jung’s motives and sincerity: if he really didn’t recognise that his question was an impossible one to answer (given the rhetorical exigency), then he disqualified himself as a serious journalist and thus, to my mind, should not be accredited again; and if he in fact knew all along that his question would be impossible for the jury to address, then one would have to conclude, it seems to me, that he posed it precisely in order to create a (political) scandal – which also seems enough of a reason for the Berlinale to deny someone like him, who is decidedly not a film-knowledgeable journalist, future accreditation.⁶ Denying him accreditation in the future, moreover, is not a matter of free speech or censorship; the Berlinale  – which is not a governmental organisation even though it receives significant funding from the German government – habitually denies accreditation, as is its right, to people who don’t have required bona fides, which in the case of the festival primarily means: who can demonstrate sufficient expertise in cinema. Given Jung’s purposefully disruptive behaviour, combined with his lack of a film-related publication record, it would seem to me perfectly reasonable for the festival to exclude him from its press corps in the future (which would not prevent him from attending screenings and participating in public Q&A sessions, as he could just get tickets like most people who were responsible for some 350,000 tickets the festival sold this year).⁷

Indeed, rewatching the press conference, I cannot help but feel that Puszczyńska must have been wondering about the journalist’s sincerity as well, for she concluded her haltingly delivered answer by stating that in her view Jung “asking us this question and expecting the ‘general’ kind of answer is not fair” (scare quotes hers), reiterating her view, offered at the start of her remarks, that “asking us this question is a little bit unfair.” It was at this very moment that Wenders proceeded to add a few sentences that would set off the ensuing media shitstorm. Likely (I speculate) trying to do his duty as jury president and help – if not protect – his jury members, he offered that “We (filmmakers) cannot really enter the field of politics. We have to stay out of politics, because if we made movies that are dedicatedly political, we’d enter the field of politics, but we are the counterweight to politics, we are the opposite of politics, we have to do the work of people and not the work of politicians” – which prompted Puszczyńska spontaneously to thank him for summarising what she was “trying nervously to say.”⁸

Ewa Puszczyńska thanking Wim Wenders at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival press conference

Now, one could certainly argue that Wenders could have done better (though I would submit that anyone who argues this should first ask themselves whe ther they could and would have done better in the same circumstances), or at least, as my friend, the prominent German film scholar Gerd Gemünden, does in his report on the Berlinale, that Wenders’ remarks were “ill-advised.”⁹ Wenders could have, for example, nuanced his use of both “we” and, respectively “politics” and “political.” Although I submit that, in fact, it’s not at all difficult to surmise his intention – the inclusive “we” certainly did not automatically preclude differentiation between individual filmmakers but asserted the (arguably debatable) existence of a commonly shared artistic sensibility as artists (in this case as filmmakers), rather than as politicians (i.e., in the sense of, say, elected presidents, chancellors, or representatives); and he used “politics” and “political” clearly in the everyday usage of these words, i.e., as referring to politicians such as U.S. President Trump or German Chancellor Merz and, more broadly speaking, to people working in governments, parliaments, and the like – it would have been conceivable for Wenders, a filmmaker who is not necessarily associated with so-called “political cinema” or thought of as a “political filmmaker” in the tradition of, say Jean-Luc Godard in his Maoist phase, directors associated with Cinema Novo and Third Cinema, or for that matter Michael Moore, to be more precise in his remarks. After all, in a short essay from 1977 on his film Der amerikanische Freund (The American Friend, 1977), he wrote that “Every film is political. Most political of all are those that pretend not to be: ‘entertainment’ movies. They are the most political films there are because they dismiss the possibility of change. In every frame they tell you everything’s fine the way it is. They are a continual advertisement for things as they are.”¹⁰ 

On social media and in more serious outlets that reported on Wenders’ words – which not only caused the Indian Booker-Prize-winning author and filmmaker Arundhati Roy to withdraw from her participation in the festival (she was scheduled to present a newly restored print of her film In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (1989) in the festival’s Classics section) but also triggered some 100 international filmmakers, all past or current Berlinale participants, to express in a widely-circulated open letter (originally released on 17 February 2026) their dismay “at the Berlinale’s involvement in censoring artists who oppose Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and the German state’s key role in enabling it” as well as their “fervent() disagree(ment) with the statement made by (Wenders) that filmmaking ‘is the opposite of politics.’” ¹¹ – this 1977 quote from Wenders was, however, as sloppily used as the open letter used the words Wenders spoke at the press conference. Note that there is a big difference between the claim made in the letter and attributed to Wenders that “filmmaking ‘is the opposite of politics’” (my emphasis) and Wenders’ actual statement that “we are the opposite of politics”  – “we” meaning filmmakers. The former claim refers to the act or activity of making films; the latter to the people who engage in the act or activity of making films. Filmmakers – artists – are, Wenders argued, the opposite of politics, which he clearly intended in the traditional sense of party politicians, etc.

Wim Wenders addressing Tilo Jung’s question at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival press conference

All of which is to say that a more generous reading of what Wenders said – easily available to anyone who would’ve just paused a moment and really thought rather than immediately rushed into opining (which is decidedly not the same as thinking, as Deleuze and Guattari once taught us)¹² – is that a filmmaker’s task is to express a worldview, indeed: a political worldview, through their art by, for instance, dramatising questions, problems, issues, or positions, as opposed to merely visualising didactic, sloganeering, one-dimensional talking points from or for op-eds or TV talk shows that pretend to offer profound thoughts on complex, vexing socio-political issues. And this (intentional?) lack of generosity vis-à-vis Wenders’ words is echoed in the rush to Wenders’ 1977 statement from his essay from The Logic of Images (recourse to which was as much of a “gotcha” gesture as Jung’s question). For what those pundits did not quote is the second half of the paragraph they weaponised against its author: “I think The American Friend is different. Yes, it’s ‘entertainment’ and it’s exciting. But it doesn’t affirm the status quo. On the contrary: everything is fluid, open, under threat. The film has no explicit political content. But it doesn’t talk down to you. It doesn’t treat its characters like marionettes – nor its audience either. A lot of ‘political’ films, unfortunately, do.”¹³ Far from contradicting himself, as the outrage-machine was quick to claim, Wenders actually expressed a position that is remarkably consistent with one – which might be characterised as an “aesthetic left” position – he’s held for half a century. One might disagree with it, but to disagree with what is little more than a strawman argument is not only intellectually dishonest but also evidence of bad faith on part of his critics.¹⁴

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Perhaps a more generous – I hesitate to assert it as “accurate” – way of parsing Wenders’ position on the relationship of film and “politics” or “the political” might be by reference to Jacques Rancière’s thinking about the relationship between aesthetics and politics, precisely because, in Wenders’ statements, two different notions of politics or the political are operative. Recall, then, that Rancière distinguishes between “traditional” politics, which he calls “police order,” and “politics,” which he argues stands in opposition to the police order, i.e., to a traditional notion of politics. Rancière holds that the police order – or what he describes as “a symbolic constitution of the social”¹⁵ – is anti-democratic, that is, de facto anti-political (“political” connotes, here, something other than “police order”); it merely seeks to maintain the existing distribution of the sensible – of what we can see, sense, and perceive and thus of what is included in the count and what is not (i.e., what’s excluded). In contrast, Rancière understands politics as the partaking in the “common” of those who have no part in the count and as the subsequent rupture of the normal distribution of roles, places, and occupations within this “common.” In this definition, politics isn’t about representation; it is, rather, immanently constituted by or as aesthetics – to wit, the process of redistributing the existing “distribution of the sensible” (“le partage du sensible”). The partaking in the common of those who have no part in the count effects a redistribution of the sensible – an act that is not driven by a sense of equality as a promise (a sense that equality is currently lacking) but by a sense of equality as a premise (a provocation). And Rancière suggests that this activity expresses both a politics of aesthetics and an aesthetics of politics: politics and aesthetics are not dialectically opposed to but immanently expressive of one another. There is no politics that is not, immanently, aesthetics, and vice versa. But politics, as well as aesthetics, here, is not a matter of doxa, of representational content, or of any specific form; it is, rather, a matter of affecting what can and cannot be seen, sensed, and perceived – a rearranging of our ability to sense, as it were.¹⁶

What matters in all this, however, is that this intervention, this redistribution of the sensible, is predicated on a position of not-belonging: of having no part in the count that established the existing distribution of the sensible (and thus of the social and its hierarchies as well as of what counts as political intervention). The act of disagreement – of issuing dissensus, as Rancière puts it – is not a dialectical operation in which those who have no part in the count engage. Rather, it is “another kind of relation between sense and sense, a supplement that both reveals and neutralises the division at the heart of the sensible”; dissensus “is not a conflict; it is a perturbation of the normal relation between sense and sense.” What dissensus does, then, is not to dialectically oppose the “normal” relation of sensation, which would merely perpetuate the very logic responsible for this existing relation, but to add an altogether different one – one that stages “an excess, a supplement that brings about a more radical way of seeing the conflict.”¹⁷ By disrupting the structuring logic responsible for the existing partitioning of the realm of the sensible, dissensus neutralises the effectiveness of the framework through which we are made to see, sense, and perceive, thus affording us the opportunity to see, sense, and perceive the existing conflict in more radical ways. Neutralisation, then, is a staging, an aesthetic intervention in the realm of the visible, the sensible, and the perceptible: to make us see, sense, and perceive the pacified (dialectically staged) conflict in more radical, a-pacifying ways.

So, for Rancière – and even though Wenders has never been suspected of working in the Marxist tradition, I think this holds true for him as well – the “goal” is to reconfigure the existing distribution of the sensible. That’s the definition of politics – and it’s a concept of politics that centres aesthetics, even if, as Rancière insists, his use of aesthetics is also non-traditional in that it’s not strictly speaking a matter of, say, style, or individual artworks such as specific paintings or films, or of “empathy,” to use the term Wenders upheld in opposition to politics when, in response to a question asked immediately preceding Jung’s, he argued that “Cinema has an incredible power of being compassionate and being empathetic. The news are not empathetic; politics are not empathetic. Movies are – and that’s our duty.”¹⁸ Why is this the case, and how do movies accomplish such compassion and empathy that, according to Wenders, are lacking in the news and in politics? By, as he had just put it, “hopefully” entering the “discrepancy” that exists “on this planet between people who want to live their lives and governments who have other ideas.” By, in other words, zooming in on the very discrepancy between the people – and their ideas and desires – and (their) governments, between the governed and the governors, between, in Rancière’s parlance, “the normal (and normalised) relation between sense and sense”; and by locating stories in this affective interstice, films, Wenders suggests, have the capacity to perturb this established relation between sense and sense. This perturbation might not make a politician change their mind, but it can render sensible at a micropolitical, affective level the sheer fact that things could and should be otherwise (if not also how this could be accomplished). In Wenders’ view, then, the business of films isn’t to judge the world – that’s the realm of the political in the traditional sense that Wenders, as a filmmaker, is rejecting – but to make viewers see anew, see otherwise. Films’ primary job – and that is their politics – is to perturb the existing distribution of the sensible: that is, to reframe, to refract, and thus to aid in the actualisation of the Rancièrian premise of equality, which as a virtual potential requires such actualisation through an act of dissensus, which is not a matter of political content in the traditional sense – and thus ultimately also moral judgment – but of aesthetics, that is, of a redistribution of the sensible, of what is and can be seen, sensed, and perceived.

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One might very well simply disagree with this position (in so far as it can even be characterised as a “position”), but I don’t think it’s legitimate to issue such disagreement by going after what is quite obviously little more than a strawman argument. This is, however, exactly what happened in this latest “scandal” at the Berlinale.¹⁹ As mentioned above, my hope for this detailed reconstruction of what occurred at the opening press conference (including my theoretical gloss thereof) is to create an accurate record – maybe more precisely: a counter-record – of what transpired, a minor gesture of dissensus to help make us look again at these events and the (reasons for the) failure of the (film) critical discourse surrounding them. 

To make us look, and hear, again: this may very well also be an apt description of what the very filmmaker whom Tilo Jung singled out in his above-quoted social-media post (see endnote 6) seeks to accomplish with her films, including her tenth feature, the stunning Meine Frau weint (My Wife Cries), which in my view should have received the Golden Bear. Indeed, I would think  – but of course I’m merely speculating – that Schanelec’s film is much closer to Wenders’ view of the relationship between film (and thus aesthetics) and politics than the much more conventionally shot Yellow Letters.

Vladimir Vulević and Agathe Bonitzer in My Wife Cries

My Wife Cries – which at the most basic level can be described (in decidedly insufficient fashion) as depicting a relationship falling apart – is the latest iteration of Schanelec’s radical cinematic exploration of the gap between seeing and saying and the question of how one can somehow understand other people and oneself despite (or perhaps precisely because of?) this fissure that constitutes communication – an aspect that most films simply gloss over. I’ve written elsewhere about this crucial aspect that we can observe in all her films, both in my book on the Berlin School of which she is one of the most indispensable filmmakers and in previous reports on the Berlinale for Senses of Cinema.²⁰ Suffice to say, here, that to me it seems nearly impossible to imagine how any viewer who allows themselves to relinquish their preconceived notions of what film “should” be like and to open themselves to the gift of Schanelec’s dogged refusal to cater to just this “should” (and whatever norms may constitute it) could not emerge from the cavernous darkness of the movie theatre with their eyes and ears – their senses – “rewired.” After seeing a Schanelec film – and this is certainly the case with her most recent effort – everything, to use Wenders’ words quoted above, “is fluid, open,” but also “under threat.” What is it that one just experienced? What did we see? What did we hear? And how come that what we hear and see so often does not line up according to how seeing and saying is “supposed” to – presumed to – connect? 

That seeing and saying so often do not (seem to) connect in her films, including My Wife Cries, is a direct effect of, inter alia, Schanelec’s relentless refusal to use a shot/reverse-shot logic in dialogue scenes (because she does not see the point in showing us again something we’ve already seen) or her penchant to give her protagonists dialogue the point of which often remains elusive to the viewer-listener habituated to hearing something being expressed that is “about” what we have seen or are seeing at that very moment. But in her films, people talk, as a character puts it, as if the sense were in the act of speaking itself. In running such a hard line on what one might call the “performative” quality of language, of speaking, Schanelec confronts her viewers with an audiovisual experience that is, for lack of a better term, affectively dissensual relative to what one experiences in most narrative (i.e., not “pure” avant-garde, experimental) films. What is unique to My Wife Cries in the context of Schanelec’s oeuvre is that with two exceptions none of the actors are native German speakers. As a result, how they utter each word intensifies even more the unusual, dissensual, way in which Schanelec deploys language — a way that one could perhaps fruitfully think alongside Deleuze and Guattari’s argument about Kafka and minor literature, to wit, their claim that Kafka makes the major language (i.e., “Goethe’s German”) stammer, by which they do not mean a speech impediment but a creative inflection of the major (or normative) language to deterritorialise it from within by making it undergo a permanent process of variation that effects the kind of perturbation of the established relationship between sense and sense of which Rancière speaks. Doing so, they hold, immanently creates a foreign language within one’s own – and being subject(ed) to the expression thereof might very well instil in the viewer-listener a potentially quite uncomfortable sense of everything being “fluid, open, under threat,” to use Wenders’ phrase.²¹ I would submit that the experience thereof – of being confronted with the rearrangement of the established relationship between sense and sense – is profoundly political.

Birte Schnöink and Thornbjörn Björnsson unorthodoxly dancing to Leonard Cohen’s “Lover, Lover, Lover” in My Wife Cries

Of all the brilliant moments in this film to which I could point as examples of how it affectively induces in me this sensation of quite literally undergoing a redistribution of what seems possible to see, sense, and perceive, let me just offer, in closing, that wonderful, almost overwhelming, even transcendental moment when some of the characters suddenly start dancing – in rather unorthodox but refreshingly un-self-conscious ways – to Leonard Cohen’s “Lover, Lover, Lover” (1974), a song that manages to “sing,” as Hannah Pilarczyk writes so astutely on the film, “what earlier was impossible to say.”²²

This moment – surely destined for cinematic eternity – redeemed this year’s festival for me.

Endnotes