Germany is Not Your Friend
Let me tell you something about German hospitality: In 2006, when Germany hosted the FIFA World Cup, the official slogan was “Die Welt zu Gast bei Freunden.” This roughly translates to, “The world has come to visit friends,” but there was an official English version as well: “A time to make friends.” Germany wanted to shed its reputation as a harsh and unwelcoming place, making an effort to appear friendly to outsiders. And this phrase certainly helped.
I can recall one school morning in 2006, shortly before the tournament was about to start. Our teacher entered the room and held up a brochure produced by the Afrika-Rat, an organization representing the interests of Berlin’s African Diaspora. This leaflet advised visitors to avoid certain “no-go zones.” Black football fans in particular should steer clear of districts like Marzahn-Hellersdorf or Köpenick in the eastern parts of the capital. This might be a great time for Germany to make new friends, but don’t forget that their old friends, the Nazis, haven’t left.
I think back to this moment a lot. On the one hand, we live and work in a country that wants to appear warm and open to the outside. It wants everyone to believe that it goes to great lengths to be hospitable and that it lends a helping hand to those in need. And it does, of course it does. But on the other hand, Germany has historically had the tendency to treat its own people like guests, and its guests with suspicion. Who can forget that viral video from a couple of years ago, in which two policemen in Berlin violently pin down a Syrian man who has failed to pay several travel fines, one of the officers telling the man’s wife that “this is my country, and you are only a guest”? Being a guest means different things for different people, I guess. And in Germany, it seems, you can’t win on either side of the definition.
“Die Welt zu Gast bei Freunden” has been on my mind of late, especially in February, when the Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale, for short) takes place in the numbing cold, showcasing new films from around the globe and hosting glitzy red carpet gala premieres.
I’ve been covering the Berlinale for the last 15 years, mostly as a film critic but a couple of times as an independent jury member, and I have found the festival’s willingness to not shy away from politics its most interesting aspect. Out of the “Big Five” — which also includes Sundance, Cannes, Venice, and Toronto — the Berlinale is considered to be the most political, a claim it proudly advertises on its website. I’ve admired the festival for firmly standing up for jailed artists like Iranian director Jafar Panahi and Zimbabwean novelist Tsitsi Dangarembga. In 2023, the festival condemned Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, allowing demonstrations on the red carpet by the Ukrainian ambassador alongside members of Ukrainian films playing at the festival. The same year, the festival also honored the massive protests in Iran that were sparked a few months earlier by the death of Jina Mahsa Amini in custody of morality police.
These are all good decisions. Why wouldn’t an international film festival address what is happening outside of its host country, especially when the films being shown speak of global issues? It also proves that it is certainly possible to add last minute panel discussions to a program if the festival finds the issue at hand important enough.
When director Burhan Qurbani’s No Beast. So Fierce. — an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Richard III set in the milieu of Berlin’s Arab clans that Roth’s ministry helped to fund — premiered at this year’s Berlinale, was Roth only clapping for the white members of the film’s cast and crew?
Between the 2024 and 2025 festivals, however, the Berlinale has struggled to demonstrate this kind of solidarity. Four months after October 7, last year’s festival took place in a climate of widespread disinvitations, cancellations, and censures of anything remotely pro-Palestinian. Only a month earlier, the Heinrich-Böll-Foundation had decided to cancel their award ceremony of the Hannah Arendt Prize to journalist Masha Gessen. It was during this moment that No Other Land managed to speak for itself and win the Berlinale’s prize for best documentary. No Other Land, which recently received the 2025 Oscar for Best Documentary, was filmed by a Palestinian-Israeli collective led by Yuval Abraham and Basel Adra and addressed the demolition of Palestinian homes by Israeli bulldozers in the West Bank. The film won while bombs were falling on Gaza in real time. Abraham and Adra used their award speeches to speak to the politicians present in the room, asking Germany to stop sending weapons to Israel and to support an immediate ceasefire.
The reactions to the award speeches have become a thing of Berlinale legend: Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who was not in attendance, decried the one-sidedness of Adra and Abraham’s perspective; Berlin Mayor Kai Wegner deemed the filmmakers’ speeches to be antisemitic; and the German culture minister, Claudia Roth, took the proverbial cake by saying that during the ceremony, she had only clapped for the Israeli Yuval Abraham and not the Palestinian Basel Adra. I can’t help but wonder: When director Burhan Qurbani’s No Beast. So Fierce. premiered at this year’s Berlinale, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Richard III set in the milieu of Berlin’s Arab clans that Roth’s ministry helped to fund, who did she clap for after she first saw it? Did she also clap for, say, Palestinian actress Hiam Abbas, who plays a major role in the film?
And Wegner, who had gone on record to support a ban on chanting in Arabic at pro-Palestinian demonstrations just a few days before the festival started, was invited as guest of honor to the 2025 opening ceremony. The film they played that night was Tom Tykwer’s The Light, which begins with dialogues in — surprise, surprise — Arabic. That dangerous foreign language is peppered throughout the film’s 162 minutes. What did the mayor make of all this? Did he leave the screening midway through? If he managed to stay right until the end, what did he take away from a film that tackles, albeit clumsily and at times preposterously, big topics like family, migration, and neo-colonialism? Did he see the film and think to himself, now might be “a time to make friends?”
With all of this in mind, I was curious to see how the Berlinale’s new director, Tricia Tuttle, who started last April, would handle this tension. What would she do exactly to address the last 12 months, and the legacy of the previous year’s festival?
At first, there were some mixed signals: When No Other Land opened in German cinemas in November 2024, Tuttle released a statement indicating that she found neither the film nor the speeches by Adra and Abraham as antisemitic. But a month later, news followed that a Berlinale staff member was reported to the police for signing a work email with “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
In January of 2025, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement officially called for a boycott of the Berlinale. Their announcement came after Tilda Swinton had been selected to receive an honorary award at the opening ceremony, an actress who had signed an early letter calling for a ceasefire. Swinton not only requested that the Berlinale show Peter Wollen’s Friendship’s Death, an early work of hers in which she plays a pro-Palestinian extraterrestrial, but she also expressed her admiration and respect for the BDS movement in a press conference the day after the ceremony — while Tuttle was sitting right next to her. This was great fodder for certain German journalists and politicians, who were waiting to pounce on the next “antisemitism scandal.” Only a few days earlier, the Berlinale had officially distanced itself from the legally non-binding “antisemitism resolution” passed by German parliament late last year (which specifically cited events at the 2024 Berlinale as antisemitic).
If I reflect on the Berlinale this year, I think it might be more fair and accurate to say that the Berlinale is not really a political festival anymore, but that in 2025 it became a politicians’ festival.
In the midst of accusations over both operating a workplace hostile to pro-Palestinian stances and giving room to antisemitism in the programming, Tuttle shied away from making a clearer statement of her own. On opening night, she chose to stand with a group of film workers and activists holding up pictures of Hamas hostage David Cunio, an actor whose film Youth had premiered at the Berlinale in 2013. Her decision to take part in this independently organized vigil without offering any statement of her own was seen by many as an act of performative solidarity. Supporting a hostage who has connections to Berlinale shouldn’t be faulted, but since the festival had a year to come up with something that would not only honor the hostages but also consider the more than 62,000 Palestinians killed by Israel, both in Gaza and the West Bank, it all seemed inadequate given the circumstances.
A documentary funded by the Israeli culture ministry about David Cunio was part of the official program, as was another film about the hostages, Brandon Kramer’s Holding Liat, which won best documentary. For the organizers of the Berlinale, this must have felt like a relief: a satisfying full-circle after what happened with No Other Land. There were no calls for a “Free Palestine” or an end to the occupation on stage in 2025, outside of director Jun Li’s reading of a strongly worded statement by his actor Erfan Shekarriz at the screening of his film Queerpanorama, during which he was interrupted by audience members, and then later interrogated by Berlin police. No, in this Berlinale, the overwhelming majority of guests who came to present their films were on their best behavior, barring just a handful of other filmmakers using their Q+As to mention Palestine. If I reflect on the Berlinale this year, I think it might be more fair and accurate to say that the Berlinale is not really a political festival anymore, but that in 2025 it became a politicians’ festival.
I feel as though the Berlinale missed a trick this year by not including a special program on Israel and Palestine. Would it have been such a tall order for Berlinale programmers to curate a special sidebar, with works like Jumanna Manna’s Foragers or From Ground Zero, a project overseen by Palestinian director Rashid Masharawi, made up of 22 short films from Gazan filmmakers? Both of these works were shown at alternative festivals like “Palinale” or “Falastin Cinema Week”, all organized in response to the Berlinale and playing in parallel to the “bigger” festival. It would have been a powerful gesture to invite such works to the Berlinale, alongside Holding Liat and A Letter to David, in order to create a more complete picture and avoid programming blind spots, much like what the Berlinale was able to do when it came to Ukraine or Iran.
“What do we gain by withdrawing and leaving the field empty for the other side to tell their story?”
Areeb Zuaiter
Well, I say blind spots, but Yalla Parkour, a moving Palestinian film on parkour athletes in Gaza, did screen in the festival’s Panorama section, coming second in the audience awards. I spoke to director Areeb Zuaiter over Zoom, asking her about attending the festival in such a fractured climate. “I have full respect for anyone who decides to boycott the festival,” she said. “But in my opinion, cultural boycotts do us more harm than they do us good.” She pointed towards the few films about Oct. 7 playing at the Berlinale, which has historically attracted a diverse audience. “I wouldn’t want those audiences to only watch films about Oct. 7 from one side. What do we gain by withdrawing and leaving the field empty for the other side to tell their story?”
One filmmaker who did decide to boycott the Berlinale this year was Abdallah Alkhatib, director of Little Palestine, Diary of a Siege, a film which was screened on the last day of the “Palinale.” Alkhatib was selected for the prestigious Berlinale Talents program and its Doc Station, which would have been an invaluable opportunity for him to network and grow as a filmmaker. His choice to withdraw therefore had real stakes. I reached out to Alkhatib and asked him what he would have liked the Berlinale to do better. “In an ideal scenario, I believe the Berlinale should have taken a clearer stance on what is happening in Palestine, as they did with Ukraine,” he wrote. “They should have created a dedicated platform for Palestinian filmmakers, as we are less fortunate and have fewer opportunities as compared to other filmmakers.”
Of the films that premiered at the festival, I have to mention Mickey 17, Bong Joon Ho’s high-concept follow-up to his multi-award winning Parasite. In this movie, a man has a job to die for — literally. Mickey Barnes signs up to be an “expendable,” agreeing to go on life-threatening missions on a space colony in order to help develop vaccines his fellow humans could benefit from. These are missions Mickey isn’t meant to survive, which is the whole point. After each death, a new Mickey is simply xeroxed out of a machine as if the old one never existed. This continues until the 17th copy of Mickey, presumed dead but still very much alive, comes face to face with the new Mickey 18.
I struggle to find a better metaphor to describe the Berlin International Film Festival. The festival turned 75 this year, and in normal circumstances, this would have been cause for a big celebration. The Berlinale and the city of Berlin will have you believe that everyone did celebrate, loudly and proudly, but if one were to take a closer look, one would be able to notice that the 75th edition of the Berlinale was a shadow of its former self, a bland, less exciting iteration, and above all haunted by the memories of its past. Much like the titular hero in Mickey 17.
There was one film that managed to capture the zeitgeist of contemporary German politics. Marcin Wierzchowski’s documentary Das Deutsche Volk — about the 2020 mass-shootings in the city of Hanau, in which a right-wing terrorist killed nine people in a racially motivated attack — celebrated its world premiere in the Berlinale Special section. There is a scene in the film I cannot forget in which the mayor of Hanau, Claus Kaminsky, tells a victim’s mother, Emiş Gürbüz, that she shouldn’t say things like “I hate Germany,” certainly not to the chancellor of Germany. Because this Germany she hates so much is made up of people who stand by her side. Shortly after the premiere of Das Deutsche Volk at this year’s Berlinale, and five years almost to the day from the attack in Hanau, a parliamentary group made up of SPD, CDU, and FDP politicians decided to publish a press release, denouncing Gürbüz’ rhetoric as hateful and disrespectful, because during her speech at a recent commemoration of the attacks, she (again) dared to criticize well-documented institutional failures surrounding the attack.
Imagine this: You come to Germany and lose your son. You say things because your son has been murdered in cold blood, you say things because you are angry, you say things because you are a grieving mother. You are patronized by German politicians who refuse to own up to their mistakes. A film is shown at a major international film festival about what happened to your child, which you believe can be helpful. More people will see your pain now, they will see how politicians have been treating you for years. And people will read the press release by politicians asking you to be more respectful and have more decency, and they won’t be able to understand how any politician can be so heartless as to tell a mother whose son has been murdered in their country how she should speak, how she should behave. Look, you have every right to say what you feel, but you have made the big mistake of saying these things to German politicians’ faces. You see, you will always be a guest to them, and in this country, guests should know their place. Don’t you know that in Germany, there are rules. In Germany, you should play by the book. The time to make friends has long gone. As the mother of a son who was murdered in Germany, you should know all of this by now.
