Not Shy… But a Little Coy, All the Same: A Panoramic View of the 75th Berlinale and 39th Teddies

People often ask us if we are a political festival. And yes, while I’d say we are a social festival, politics is in our DNA. We are the only major A-list festival that is in a capital city, and Berlin is a city steeped in history. We do not shy away from this. [Emphasis mine]

– Tricia Tuttle, Berlinale Festival Director

Thems were fighting words from an incoming director, and immediately pleasing to mine eyes, thought I, as I perused a dossier released to press after the Berlinale Special and competition titles were announced on 21 January. This was three weeks before the 75th edition commenced – a milestone edition for a festival which – and this hadn’t escaped anybody’s attention – would mount its Closing Ceremony the very night before a federal election. Moreover, this election was expected to give levels of representation in parliament to a far-right German political party unprecedented since World War II.

I was pleased to later read the same passage as the editorial introduction to the official festival catalogue. This seemed game, considering how ineptly the festival, and political figures semi-attached to it, handled a variety of imbroglios that blew up last year during Carlo Chatrian and Mariette Rissenbeek’s joint final festival at the helm.

The two politicians who famously showered themselves then in gormless inglory were granted a few welcoming paragraphs apiece in the official program. That’s as much as we got to hear from the Minister of State for Culture and the Media, Claudia “The Sound of Two Hands Clapping Only One Filmmaker” Roth, and the Governing Mayor of Berlin, Kai Wegner. They were both denied an opportunity to get on the mic on Opening Night – or, indeed, I believe, throughout the entire festival.

This was an astute manoeuvre, ensuring that Roth and Wegner didn’t hijack any proceedings in the putative interests of cracking down on supposedly rampant antisemitism at the festival. This further ensured that they didn’t publicly embarrass and scandalise themselves, the festival, the nation and film culture more broadly by waxing incoherent on matters pertaining to Israel’s genocidal actions in Palestine. (Notwithstanding that atrocities were on official, negotiated hiatus throughout the festival.)

Should you need to be brought up to speed, might I point you towards my report in Senses from last year, “The 38th Teddy Award at the 74th Berlinale: A Dutiful Juror’s Report”,¹ or to an open letter from Dirty Movies editor Victor Fraga, “Talking to an old friend: our open letter to the Berlinale”.²

Tilda Swinton, Berlinale Palast, with Honorary Golden Bear

No, instead, Opening Night attendees near and far – I believe this was livestreamed on German TV! – were regaled by none other than Tilda Swinton delivering an address for the ages upon being gifted an Honorary Golden Bear for career achievement.

Here she is, five minutes into a glorious 13-minute-long oration, on what “being human means”:

We can head for the great independent state of cinema, and rest there. An unlimited realm, innately inclusive: immune to efforts of occupation, colonisation, takeover, ownership or the development of riviera property…

[Pause for hearty applause upon the clear allusion to Donald Trump’s deranged “Gaza Riviera” ambitions]

 … a borderless realm, and with no policy of exclusion, persecution or deportation.³

[Further vigorous applause]

A masterclass, it was, in saying commonsense things with flair and dignity, poetry and grace. And sure, if she didn’t mention Palestine specifically in this speech – and nor would most others granted a platform at the festival – what and whom she was referring to was crystal clear.

*

I was at the Berlinale this year as a FIPRESCI juror for the Panorama section of the program, alongside Ariel Schweitzer and Ivonete Pinto, rather than as a Teddy (queer film award) juror like last year. I didn’t catch Swinton firsthand on Opening Night – I’m one of the 135,000 viewers, and counting, to have caught her speech on YouTube subsequently. Instead, I attended the strangely concurrent opening screening of the Panorama. This was Andreas Prochaska’s so-so return-to-one’s-unheimlich-Austrian-village-childhood-home horror flick, Welcome Home Baby. Ghosts of supernatural horror films past certainly haunted this film; one in particular helping clarify that the film’s title is not itself haunted by a typo. (To wit, there’s no comma missing between “Home” and “Baby”.)

Friendship’s Death

I did though catch Swinton in conversation with Tricia Tuttle the next morning in the grand Zoo Palast Cinema 1. Swinton, having been given carte blanche to program any one of her films, introduced a screening of famed film semiotician Peter Wollen’s Friendship’s Death (1987); it was her first leading role, in only her second film. If Tuttle and Swinton’s conversation again skirted around naming Palestine directly, the film certainly doesn’t. For a revival of an underseen, if recently 4K-restored, ‘80s film pitched in the program as: “Tilda Swinton plays the extra-terrestrial android “Friendship” who discusses life’s big questions with a British war correspondent in a hotel in Amman during the civil war in Jordan in 1970”,⁴ it sure smuggled into the Berlinale a whole lotta explicit siding with the plight of Palestinians. And not just circa 1970 (when it was mostly set), or circa 1987 (when it premiered) but also clearly in the current day. Wollen’s film draws explicit parallels between the inability of Swinton’s titular alien cyborg, Friendship, to return home, and the dispossessed lot in life imposed upon the Palestinian people. This reaches peak clarity when (spoiler alert) Friendship makes their last stand by adopting Leila Khaled-esque garb to join the Palestinian struggle directly.

This was my one dalliance with the Berlinale Special section this year. Not for me the red carpet shenanigans of, nor press conferences with, big name gets attached to films I’d either seen in Melbourne prior to landing in Berlin (A Complete Unknown, James Mangold) or which’d be in cinemas as soon as I returned (Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17). There’d be no sidling up alongside Timothée Chalamet, Robert Pattinson or Toni Collette for me. My focus was, necessarily and dutifully, the Panorama section, but I also took in a few Panorama- and Teddy-adjacent films from other strands which would have sat well in the Panorama.

1001 Frames

My Panorama highlights included Iranian American writer-director Mehrnoush Alia’s bold, claustrophobic debut feature, 1001 Frames, shot clandestinely in Iran. Delivered in a mosaic-like fashion, it concerns casting couch liberties taken by an evidently household-name director (Mohammad Aghebati) while auditioning actresses – ingenues, almost entirely – for the role of Scheherazade in a new production of “One Thousand and One Nights”. The camera privileges the perpetrator’s point-of-view throughout.

The more the film manoeuvres as if to depict the sorts of #MeToo transgressions powerful male figures in film the world over have been culpable of, the more the tension and viewer discomfort rises (why, one might even come to entertain ideas of the narrative assuming Peeping Tom, Michael Powell, 1960-like dimensions!), even if Iranian cinema surely can’t show explicit scenes of sex and/or violence… can it?

What can or cannot be shown, or discussed on- or off-screen, is further problematised by the song that closes the film: a rendition, sung by a female vocalist, of Louis Armstrong’s “St. James Infirmary Blues”. Famously, an instrumental version of this song graces Abbas Kiarostami’s Ta’m-e gīlās (Taste of Cherry, 1997), commencing during its metafictional “relax – we’re only making a film” closing sleight of hand.

Such a specific invocation couldn’t help but make me wonder – rightly? wrongly? – whether the director figure in 1001 Frames was meant to be a stand-in for any one filmmaker within the Iranian industry. That the sole experienced actress auditioning is explicitly positioned as having had her creative contribution to a past collaboration with the director appropriated, and her reputation in the industry trashed, by him, has resonances with accusations of similar (and worse) levelled by filmmaker and artist Mania Akbari – the driver in Ten (Abbas Kiarostami, 2002) – against its credited director.⁵ But perhaps I’m barking up the wrong cherry tree altogether?

The Ugly Stepsister

Feminism and horror were suffused throughout Emilie Blichfeldt’s Den stygge stesøsteren (The Ugly Stepsister), a fractured fairy tale squirm-inducingly heavy indeed on the fracturing (and amputating, and on other acts of desperate, mediaeval body modification). Ah, Blichfeldt doesn’t half take the beauty myths fundamental to Cinderella stories and tear them another one! Lea Myren is magnificent as the gawky Elvira, stepsister of the comely Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Næss) who cannot, however, make a truthful claim to maidenhood and thus, conventional Cinderella-dom, for she and a lowly stable hand are lovers already – and how! But oh! the measures Elvira will adopt to land the unlikely hand in marriage of handsome Prince Julian (Isac Calmroth) – not withstanding that he, like Agnes, in no way conforms to the model of fairy tale innocence one might expect him to.

Wonderful practical effects work adds to the gleeful, splanchnic abjection and visceral punishment transmitted by Blichfeldt’s feature debut, which would pair beautifully in a double bill with any of The Substance (Coralie Fargeat), Miike Takashi’s Ōdishon (Audition, 1999), Juraj Herz’s Panna a netvor (a similarly fetid revisionist Beauty and the Beast, 1979) or Georges Franju’s timeless plastic surgery disaster horror, Les Yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face, 1960). What larks!⁶

It would also double well with Lucile Hadžihalilović’s latest La Tour de Glace (The Ice Tower); may its short turnaround time in the wake of her prior feature, 2021’s Earwig, augur well for a more prolific output from her from here on in! While not in the Panorama, The Ice Tower would not have been the least out of place there. (It was in fact placed in the Competition; moreover, it wound up winning the Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution for its “creative ensemble”.)

The Ice Tower

Like The Ugly Stepsister, The Ice Tower repurposes a familiar fairy tale – here, it’s Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen. But, true to form, Hadžihalilović’s designs on the source material are more enigmatic, and as measured and mesmerising as ever. Orphaned teenager Jeanne (newcomer Clara Pacini), accustomed to reading The Snow Queen to a younger sibling-of-sorts of an evening, runs away from her alpine foster home, only to chance upon a film production of that very story in a nearby town.

Its star? The glamorous but frosty Cristina, played by Marion Cotillard – an actor whose stardom now far exceeds what she possessed when appearing in the director’s first great film in the labyrinthine-fantastique mode she’s made her own, 2004’s Innocence. The still radiant Cotillard can now play just weathered enough to evoke a jaded, tantrum-prone, old-time film star, with shades of Marlene Dietrich and perhaps, in nominal allusion to royalty, Greta Garbo, and bestow upon her a sinister gravitas. But… once Jeanne is absorbed as an extra into the filmed world of the Snow Queen (filmed by a director played by Hadžihalilović’s bewigged husband, Gaspar Noé, no less), will she be able to maintain a distinction between that ersatz, soundstage-bound universe, and her own – or is she too far gone, under the spell of one Snow Queen or another?

Reflection in a Dead Diamond

I was drawn inexorably to one other Competition title, and this one really might have sat better in Panorama, such was its certainty to polarise opinion, and such thus were its hopes poor as a prize contender. I speak of the latest Cattet-Forzani joint, Reflet dans un diamant mort (Reflection in a Dead Diamond). The pairing of Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani have, to my mind, outdone themselves with this, their fourth virtuosic, fever dream valentine to genre cinemas of yesteryear. This time they’ve honed in on 1960s Fantômas (Louis Feuillade, 1913)-fuelled fumetti adaptations, such as those concerned with the sexy exploits of master criminals like the masked and cat-suited titular menace (John Phillip Law) of Mario Bava’s Diabolik (Danger: Diabolik, 1968). See also lesser Italian entries in the genre like Umberto Lenzi’s Kriminal (1966) and Satanik (Piero Vivarelli, 1968).

Reflection in a Dead Diamond plays like a berserk, ultra-violent Euro-spy mash-up of those films as if pieced together by Alain Robbe-Grillet, foregrounding both his trademark lashings of kink and his no less fetishistic disposition towards fragmentary, Möbius strip narrative puzzles. I was sure I caught a glimpse at one point of a Magritte painting, seemingly apropos of nothing – although… was it one of his “La belle captive” series, in which a painted canvas on an easel bears an image that fits seamlessly, confoundingly, against the landscape the painting has been positioned in front of? Which could be a tip of Fantômas’s hat, perhaps, to Robbe-Grillet’s 1983 film of the same name, a name it shares with his 1975 nouvelle roman which came accompanied by reproductions of Magritte paintings?

Oh, such questions – questions attached to a gross surplus of signification and allusion – does this latest Cattet-Forzani film pose in frenetic, labyrinthine superabundance, and to my great delight! However, I gather some viewers not enamoured of or familiar with the homaged source texts were perplexed, repelled or just plain bored by the film, left only with grandiose displays of camera and editing ingenuity, divorced from clear meaning or affect, to be overwhelmed or exhausted by.

*

It seems I’ve digressed. So let’s get back to the Panorama, and to direct engagement with matters political in a strong field of documentary works.

Yalla Parkour

Areeb Zuaiter brought us swathes of joyous, nostalgia-infused footage from a few years back of (sometimes Jackass-worthy) parkour pratfalls in the ruins and bombsites of Gaza, in her Red Sea Fund-assisted feature debut, Yalla Parkour. That joy was tempered, in no small poignant amount, by the immensely greater, ecocidal ruination inflicted upon Gaza and its people subsequently. The director’s own wistfulness towards her broken familial links to Palestine contributes a certain level of pathos, but the relative safety she has enjoyed living in the US compared to Ahmed Matar, her regular Gazan correspondent providing her with parkour videos, makes one inevitably feel much more concerned for him than her. His life, and that of his fellow traceurs, is enormously precarious. But… could parkour conceivably create a pathway to sanctuary abroad?

Crushingly, but unsurprisingly, four members of the film crew and one traceur were listed in memoriam in the closing credits.

Queer Polish visual artist and filmmaker Kinga Michalska also made a feature debut with a film concerning genocide. Bedrock plays as an unsettling travelogue taking in Holocaust sites across Poland latterly repurposed – or in the process of being repurposed – to often banal ends. Furthermore, erasure of the horrors to have occurred at these sites has become commonplace. Perhaps most shocking was the aggressively parochial football fandom-cum-hooliganism on display in the village of Oświęcim (aka Auschwitz), as the fans’ team’s victory in a minor leagues’ match is celebrated.

In a big swing, Michalska bookends her film with fuzzy footage that, at first, is enigmatically decontextualised – what even is it? Towards the end though, it becomes clearer in such a way (I shan’t spoil it) that Bedrock demands parallels be drawn between Polish complicity in the Holocaust and the cruelty Polish officials are meting out to asylum seekers along the border with Belarus in the present day – lest anyone out there still thinks Agnieszka Holland’s furious Zielona granica (Green Border, 2023) was a work of fanciful, propagandistic fiction.

Michalska’s Q&A at her film’s premiere was lively. Her acknowledging that she’s a Gentile who could be horrified by the Holocaust (of course!) and be able to acknowledge Israel’s actions in Palestine as genocidal, made for one of the few heated occasions I encountered at this year’s festival. One audience member tried to “correct” the filmmaker on spurious semantic grounds, only to be shouted down by other audience members who knew how to call a spade a spade, and a genocide a genocide.

Under the Flags, the Sun

We ultimately gave our FIPRESCI award for the Panorama section to a third very strong political documentary. Per our jury statement, we awarded “an archival film about a dictator who was in power in Paraguay for over 30 years. (Bajo las banderas, el sol, Under the Flags, the Sun), by Juanjo Pereira, is a subtle and mature work, both in its approach to history and in its aesthetic. It has the courage to look back into history by using a contemporary language through which it manages to deconstruct, employing irony, the official representation of this regime”.⁷

I have to confess that, prior to watching this captivating found-footage doco – again, a feature film debut! – I knew precious little about Alfredo Stroessner’s 35-year military dictatorship in Paraguay, which ended only as recently as that famous year of downfall for so many totalitarian regimes the world over, 1989. References to Paraguay having harboured Nazi war criminals – most notably Josef Mengele (also linked to a location visited in Bedrock) – rang a bell. The footage throughout, though, was wholly unfamiliar to me – as it was, I gather, to many. Much of it was drawn from “newsreels, public television broadcasts, propaganda films and declassified documents”⁸ to have emerged from archive trawling only very recently. Remarkable.

Three further Panorama highlights concerned the lives of notable queer artists. Billy Shebar and David Roberts’ kaleidoscopic documentary Monk in Pieces served as my introduction to Meredith Monk (1942-), multidisciplinary artist extraordinaire whose innovations in the vocabularies of song and movement confounded the patronising patriarchal NYC cognoscenti early in her career. Revelatory archival footage abounds! I’d never seen or heard anything quite like her before.

Peter Hujar’s Day

I felt similarly late to the party getting acquainted with her fellow New Yorker, photographer Peter Hujar (1934-1987) through Ira Sachs’ 24-hours-in-the-life-of, chamber piece biopic, Peter Hujar’s Day. It’s in fact an adaptation – a verbatim reading of a transcript of a meeting between author Linda Rosenkrantz and the photographer, in which the latter recounted, with plentiful name-dropping, everything that happened one particular day. Rebecca Hall plays Rosenkrantz and Ben Whishaw, Hujar, as naturalistically as can be – a sensible decision, given the material they were working with. So it was slightly jarring when they both participated (with Sachs) in a lively Q&A after the premiere, revealing their appreciably different natural speaking voices and accents.

While I found the film middlingly interesting as an exercise – after all, there can’t have been any binding requirement to render the dialogue of this encounter with absolute fidelity – I remain grateful for the introduction to Hujar and, by extension, his work, which was simultaneously being celebrated in London’s Raven Row gallery. Last year the Berlinale premiered Ještě nejsem, kým chci být (I’m Not Everything I Want to Be), Klára Tasovská’s tremendous documentary on the belatedly celebrated Czech photographer Libuše Jarcovjáková, whose work has just enjoyed a significant retrospective at a campus of the Czech National Gallery in Prague. And Sam Shahid recently delivered Hidden Master: The Legacy of George Platt Lynes (2023), an eye-popping doco on another brilliant queer photographer who’d long been consigned to the margins. May this cinematic excavation of under-heralded queer artists continue unabated!

Which brings us to Rosa von Praunheim, enfant terrible turned grand seigneur of German queer cinema, and his swansong(?), Satanische Sau (Satanic Sow). A typically candid Rosa divulged at the Teddy Award ceremony that Satanic Sow was initially rejected by the festival, the news being delivered to him directly by Panorama head, Teddy Foundation executive board member (and newly minted Co-Director of Film Programming at the Berlinale alongside Jacqueline Lyanga), Michael Stütz. Corroborating this, it was not mentioned in a 21 January Teddy press release listing all of the Teddy contenders.

And yet, lo! And behold! This defiant, hugely entertaining, no-budget, queer-as-fuck docu-fantasia, in which von Praunheim (as played by Armin Dallapiccola) ruminates over his mortality across a series of comical vignettes, punctuated by excerpts from a few of the director’s 150-odd films, went on to win the Teddy for Best Documentary/Essay Film! Moreover, this means that the 82-year-old von Praunheim now has a film longlisted for Oscar glory, as his specific Teddy bestows upon the winner contention, as of this year, for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film. Huzzah! Who’d ever’ve thunk it?

*

The Panorama offered a number of strong contenders in the Teddy Feature Film category. Shatara Michelle Ford’s Dreams in Nightmares put three richly drawn queer Black women (Dezi Bing, Denée Benton and Sasha Compere) on a road trip across the American Midwest in search of a friend who’d seemingly disappeared. It’s a gentler film than the title might suggest – a hangout film rather than a work of suspense or horror – even if one might reasonably fear the worst for the women as they traverse parts of the country not always trumpeted for hospitality towards Black folk.

Tension and thrills were certainly on offer in Hard Paint (2018) directors Marcio Reolon and Filipe Matzembacher’s decidedly horny Ato noturno (Night Stage). Two up-and-comers – one an actor (Gabriel Faryas), the other a politician (Cirillo Luna) – are hot for each other, and for sex in public spaces, whether the local cruising park or, indeed, a car park. That this could pose a threat to their respective ambitions and career trajectories doesn’t escape them. If anything, it only encourages them…

Lesbian Space Princess!

The Teddy jury of Allegra Madsen (Frameline Executive Director), Raul Niño Zambrano (Sheffield DocFest Creative Director) and Berlin-based curator, film journalist and programmer Jan Künemund surprised us all by awarding neither of these textbook examples of queer excellence and instead garlanded the very Australian animated feature, Lesbian Space Princess! (Um, yes, it is a comedy, and yes, it does have great fun at the expense of “straight white maliens” and other right drongos that are a blight upon the Universe. Why do you ask?)

The co-directors of this wonderfully silly film, Leela Varghese and Emma Hough Hobbs, both looked flabbergasted upon coming onto the stage – and not just because, improbably, it was Fan Bingbing handing them their award! Each contributed to their acceptance speech in turn; Hough Hobbs’ speech included the following:

We were so privileged to make this film, and for this film to bring us here. We made it on the stolen lands of the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains, and in Australia, our First Nations people were displaced in their own land, and a modern parallel is occurring right now in Gaza and the West Bank, perpetrated by the state of Israel, and it’s supported by the governments of Australia, Germany, the United States and more. And as queer people, and as queer filmmakers, we are not free until we are all free.⁹

Wunderbar, nein? Indeed, this speech was greeted only with cheers and applause, in stark contrast to the response my fellow Teddy juror Diego Armando Aparicio received last year, when delivering our collective jury statement in support of a ceasefire in Gaza.¹⁰ On that occasion, there had been boos and applause, in similar number and volume. So: progress!

This year’s delightful ceremony had begun strongly, when host Britta Steffenhagen asked us all to “Please welcome Tricia Tuttle… the Queen!”, followed by Tuttle gushing, as follows:

Oh my God… My first Teddies! Aaaaah! […] It’s really, really wonderful to be here, and I’m pinching myself; I’m pinching my young queer self because I’m sitting in the front row between Monika Treut and Todd Haynes and I might die… I might die of joy. Aaah!¹¹

A note to all other festival directors out there, whether queer (the festival and/or the director, that is), or otherwise: it’s with such humility and impassioned enthusiasm that you will endear yourself to your audiences (whether queer, or otherwise). Bless!

Haynes was present not simply as the President of the 2025 International Jury that would, at the official Closing Ceremony the following night, issue the Golden Bear for Best Film to Drømmer (Dreams (Sex Love)) – being Dag Johan Haugerud’s third entry in a trilogy that began with a Teddy nominee I didn’t warm to last year, Sex.

Rather, Haynes was there, pursuant to a wonderful laudatory speech from German film cultural powerhouse, Jenni Zylka, and a clips montage, to receive a Special Teddy Award. Haynes’ acceptance speech – his second, after previously winning a Teddy in 1991 for Poison – occasioned a rapturous standing ovation. And that was before he’d even uttered a word!

I can’t resist mentioning a personal highlight – a little something that probably tickled only a few of us in the room. Having recently enjoyed the privilege of occupying the station of Program Director for the Melbourne Queer Film Festival, I guffawed at its graphical representation in a patchwork of images standing in for queer film fests the lucky winner of a raffle sponsored by Air France might think to visit. See below… Yup – that’s my Melbourne, alright, and no mistake. Ha!

Teddy Award Ceremony

I had but one Teddy gripe – the awards would benefit from having a second clip to play for any winning film, so as not to throw to a clip we’ve already seen during the ceremony when the nominees were being announced. But that aside, I couldn’t much fault my night at the Teddies.

The official Berlinale Closing Ceremony the following night was, comparatively, a sedate affair. Again, kudos to Tuttle and team for giving Roth and Wegner nowt more than a shout-out at the start of the night – the very least that protocol demanded, I’d imagine – and keeping them off the mic.

After all the drama at last year’s ceremony that spiralled into full-blown clusterfuck territory, there was a certain frisson of expectation. It seemed though like there must have been a memo that everyone got, jurors and winners alike, to be on best behaviour and not mention the war.

Radu Jude may not have got / paid attention to my imaginary memo, however, and livened things up plenty upon accepting the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay for Kontinental ’25 (which I will have to wait to catch up with elsewhere). Following Swinton’s allusive lead on Opening Night, even everyone’s favourite sardonic Romanian auteur didn’t quite bring himself to utter “Palestine” at the Closing Ceremony. However, I don’t expect there was any doubt whom he was referring to when he declared that he hoped “the International Criminal Court in The Hague will pursue its job against all these murderous bastards.”

And for the coup de grâce? Mindful of the election occurring the following day, Jude added “I just hope that next year’s festival doesn’t open with Triumph of the Will by Leni Riefenstahl.”

Now that’s how not to shy away from politics.

*

From the other side of the election, in which the far-right AfD (the so-called “Alternative für Deutschland”) won as much as 20%(!), but also as little as 20% of the vote (Berlin-based friends had worried it might be higher), I have a more sanguine outlook for the festival for next year than I did at the same time last year. Hooray! Tuttle’s made good on her first year in the job, with scarcely a shitstorm blow up this February. Nonetheless, in a world going increasingly mad, and with circumstances in Palestine becoming direr again post-festival (linked to the spiralling havoc being wrought everywhere else too by the kakistocracy in the US), Tuttle and her crew will still have a lot of work to do to maintain momentum and retain the plentiful goodwill clawed back from the fallout from last year’s missteps. I doubt the festival will be able to shy further away from political realities linked to taboo subjects in Germany that may get more uncomfortable again over the next twelve months. (Were that people in Palestine were only merely uncomfortable! Ah, luxury!)

Come 2026 and there might be no place for coyness at all.

Also – and I concede this might be a bit much to ask – but if the festival could kindly organise for it be subzero temperatures for fewer days and nights next year, that’d be just fabulous too.

Berlinale
13 – 23 February 2025
https://www.berlinale.de

Endnotes