Filmmakers use the awards ceremony to demonize Israel. The audience applauds. The Green Minister of State for Culture Claudia Roth is once again criticized.
The filmmakers Ben Russell (left) and Guillaume Cailleau at the awards ceremony at the Berlinale.
This year’s International Film Festival in Berlin came to an unpleasant end. At the closing gala of the Berlinale on Saturday, director Ben Russell accused the Israeli government of committing genocide against the Palestinians. Russell wore some sort of Palestinian scarf on stage. He received applause and approval from the audience. The award winner and filmmaker Basel Adra also received strong applause. He had called on Germany to stop supplying arms to Israel.
The governing mayor of Berlin, Kai Wegner, who attended the gala, spoke of an “unbearable relativization”. However, the CDU politician only expressed his criticism of the speeches afterwards on X (formerly Twitter). The Israeli ambassador to Germany, Ron Prosor, said that “anti-Semitic and anti-Israel rhetoric” would be celebrated at the Berlinale under the guise of freedom of speech and freedom of art. The silence of the cultural sector is deafening.
Questionable award for “No Other Land”
During the gala, several award winners made one-sided statements about the Middle East conflict and made accusations against Israel, without mentioning the terrorist attack by the Islamist Hamas on October 7th last year or calling for the release of the Israeli hostages.
The Berlinale had already positioned itself quite clearly beforehand. The film “No Other Land,” which almost ignores the Israeli perspective on the Middle East conflict, was named best documentary. Hero is, as the competition program officially states, “a young Palestinian activist from Masafer Yatta in the West Bank” who is fighting against the “Israeli occupation”.
For a short time, the anti-Israel motto “Free Palestine – from the river to the sea” was spread on an official Berlinale Instagram account. The slogan denies Israel’s right to exist. A Palestine from the river to the sea would be a country that stretched from the Jordan to the Mediterranean and thus included the entire former British mandate of Palestine, as before the founding of the state of Israel.
The accusation that Israel was carrying out a “genocide in Gaza” and, with German support, was guilty of “state terrorism” was also briefly published on the account. The Berlinale explained this as a hacker attack. They distance themselves and have filed a criminal complaint against unknown persons.
Similarities with the Documenta scandal
This year the film festival took place for the last time under the direction of Mariette Rissenbeek and Carlo Chatrian. In the future it will be headed by the American Tricia Tuttle. In contrast to the criticized prize winners, Rissenbeek had taken a somewhat more nuanced tone: “We call on Hamas to release the hostages immediately, and we call on Israel to do everything possible to protect the civilian population in Gaza and to ensure that that lasting peace can return to the region.”
The Berlinale receives significant funding from the federal budget. That’s why Minister of State for Culture Claudia Roth from the Greens is once again on the defensive. Ambassador Prosor wrote on X that the German cultural scene only rolls out the red carpet for artists who stir up sentiment against Israel.
The wrong lessons were learned from the scandal at the Documenta art exhibition in Kassel. In 2022, an Indonesian artist collective presented anti-Semitic art there. There was a scandal, also because the Documenta is also supported with tax money. At the time, Minister of State Roth was criticized for her hesitant actions.
According to an editor of the “Tagesspiegel” Both Roth and Berlin’s mayor Wegner clapped after the speech by activist and filmmaker Yuval Abraham, who had accused Israel of apartheid and called for an “end to the occupation.” This Monday, Roth reacted and corrected the clapping agreement as well as her previous praise for the Berlinale as a “place for dialogue, different perspectives, diversity and democracy”. Now Roth has announced that she wants to work through the “events” at the Berlinale together with Berlin’s governing mayor. The statements at the award ceremony were “shockingly one-sided and characterized by a deep hatred of Israel.”
However, said CDU Bundestag member Maximilian Mörseburg, Germany’s Jews were not adequately protected from attacks from the cultural sector with Roth as Minister of State for Culture. Mörseburg, who is also chairman of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group in the Culture and Media Committee, suggested that the Greens replace Roth. The cultural policy spokesman for the AfD parliamentary group in the Bundestag, Marc Jongen, sees it similarly. Roth’s distancing is without any credibility in view of her “consistent promotion of anti-Semitic post-colonialism”. The “anti-Jewish oath of disclosure” at the Berlinale must have consequences.