Middle East conflict weighs heavily on Berlin film festival
• The war has become loud, angry and messy in the entertainment industry
As the war in Gaza continues, with the death toll reportedly rising to 27,000 and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week rejecting the terms of a proposed ceasefire, in spite of increased pressure from the US, the furious polarisation that the conflict has created around the world, and in the creative sectors in particular, shows little hope of abating.
In the film and television industry the battle between proIsrael and pro-Palestinian supporters has become loud, angry and messy.
The Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival in November 2023 saw fights and protests over the conflict, with a dozen directors pulling their films out of competition in protest against the festival’s condemnation of protests against Israel’s retaliation for the October 7 attacks by Hamas. A group of 16 Israeli directors signed an open letter in response, in which they expressed their “disappointment and concern”, at the use of the slogan “From the river to the sea,” during protests by pro
Palestinian protesters at the festival’s opening ceremony.
At the Sundance film festival in January, hundreds of protesters took to the streets of Park City in Utah to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
Now as the eyes of the European film industry turn towards Berlin, ahead of the 2024 edition of the Berlinale Film Festival, which opens next week, tension about the IsraelPalestine conflict, combined with broader fears of the rise of far-right, anti-immigration political parties in Germany, are boiling furiously under the surface, threatening to spill over and disrupt the organiser’s perhaps naive hopes for a calm, nonpolitical edition of one of the film calendar’s top events.
The German government’s attitude towards pro-Palestinian groups and advocates has come under scrutiny and led to outrage and condemnation for what many see as a cowardly, antidemocratic, blindly proIsrael stance.
At first, the protests seemed to be small and easy to ignore with only two directors whose films were selected for the 2024 festival announcing that they were pulling their films from the competition in support of the #Strike Germany campaign, which has called for a boycott of the Berlinale and all German cultural institutions in protest against the German government’s support of Israel and its “alleged censorship of pro-Palestinian views”, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
The small number of films pulled led to festival organisers declaring confidently that the 2024 edition of the festival would not be disrupted by protests, even if they were unwilling to comment on the broader and more pressing issue of the government’s stance on the conflict and its alleged punishing and sidelining of creatives who have shown support for the Palestinians by withdrawing awards and state funding for them and their projects.
While protests against Israel have been shut down by the German government, protests against the worrying rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party have been growing and seen hundreds of thousands of protesters spilling onto the country’s streets in recent months.
The AfD is in second place in national polls in Germany and the party has been called out by Germans across the political spectrum for its violently antiimmigrant and Islamophobic rhetoric, with many Germans calling for it to be declared “antidemocratic” by the German supreme court.
The tension around the AfD spilt over into the Berlinale last week when it was announced, that following what the festival organisers say is standard protocol, elected members of the AfD were among those invited to attend the opening ceremony. In response, more than 200 film professionals signed an open letter to the festival’s organisers decrying the decision and planning protests against the AfD on the red carpet during opening night. There are also rumblings that several filmmakers will withdraw their films from competition in further protest.
The organisers have refused to back down, citing protocol as the justification for the AfD invites. According to Deadline, festival organisers have said that “members of the AfD were elected to the Bundestag and the Berlin House of Representatives in the last elections. Accordingly, they are also represented in political cultural committees and other bodies. That is a fact, and we have to accept it as such”.
Though the festival may be demonstrating an unwillingness to address the concerns of those protesting against AfD, it may have, in a very small way, done something to address the debates and protests it still expects to affect its programme due to the conflict in the Middle East.
Festival organisers announced this week that they will be collaborating with Berlin social activists to create an intimate safe space at the Berlinale for discussion and debate around the Middle East crisis in a “Tiny Space ”— a small cabin on wheels near the red carpet, in which for the first three days of the festival at least people can enter and talk “about aspects of the war, but also the conflict in the Middle East more generally”, according to Berlinale MD Mariëtte Rissenbeek.
From 10am to 6pm daily, if the war in Gaza is upsetting you, you can climb into the cabin and talk about it — which though it isn’t quite the same as being able to make your voice heard in the festival’s screening venues, which house hundreds of people, it is, as far as the Berlinale is concerned, better than not having any space to say anything at all.
Originally implemented as a schools project in Germany, the Tiny Space project is an initiative started by German Palestinian Shai Hoffman and German Jew Jouanna Hassoun to provide a place for safe discussion of the difficult topics that surround the hot-potato issue of conflict in the Middle East. After the October 7 attacks, the cabin, which holds about four people, was taken to various pop-up locations in and around Berlin to facilitate discussions on the issues with locals.
Now, the Berlinale has welcomed the Tiny Space project onto its red carpet and as artistic director Carlo Chatrian says, its presence is hoped to be able to facilitate a small contribution to constructive debate of an issue, where, “right now, in society, it has become very hard to combine the two sides of the debate ... What we’d like to do as a festival is to provide a place where a dialogue is possible.
“We believe a dialogue is possible if we start with small groups [and] provide a space where certain arguments or certain emotions can be handled better than in a theatre with 500 or 1,500 people.”
So if you are at the 2024 Berlinale and you find yourself standing outside a small cabin, and it’s rocking, don’t come knocking — you may just upset the only chance for constructive dialogue on the Middle East crisis that Germany is willing to provide.
THE GERMAN GOVERNMENT’S ATTITUDE TOWARDS PRO-PALESTINIAN GROUPS … HAS COME UNDER SCRUTINY