I
This year’s Berlin International Film Festival opened on a rare sunny winter’s day in the German capital. In the early afternoon of February 12, the international jury, led by its president Wim Wenders, filed into the Grand Hyatt for the opening press conference. Film festival veterans are used to these tedious rituals, the lazy questions and duller answers that they invariably generate. So it was genuinely refreshing when Tilo Jung, a 40-year-old German broadcast journalist with a popular political online program, Jung & Naiv, provocatively asked about the Berlinale’s stance, as an institution, on the rights of Palestinians given “the German government’s support of the genocide in Gaza.” Referring to past editions where the festival has expressed solidarity with Iran and Ukraine — a video address by President Zelenskyy opened the Berlinale in 2023 — Jung asked, with admirable chutzpah, whether the jury agreed with “this selective treatment of human rights?”
Ewa Puszczynska, a Polish film producer whose credits include Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar-winning “The Zone of Interest,” jumped into the fray with a rambling and borderline incoherent response that basically chided Jung for posing a question she found unfair.
Wenders, perhaps hoping to diffuse the situation, piped up with an answer that only added to the confusion. “We cannot really enter the field of politics,” the 80-year-old filmmaker began, calling films and filmmakers “the counterweight to” and “the opposite of” politics.
Wenders’ answer might have contained a kernel of philosophical truth, but it sounded profoundly out of touch, especially coming from someone who was chairing the jury of the world’s most robustly political film festival. Founded in 1951 in the city that was soon to become a powder keg of the Cold War, the Berlinale has long embraced its role as a festival held in a city whose long list of calamities helped defined the 20th century, a city positioned at the crossroads of East and West that was, correspondingly, a key ideological battleground for modern Europe.
Over the past three quarters of a century, the Berlinale has a record of debuting, and awarding, politically important, and often divisive, films. Early touchstones included Michael Verhoeven’s “o.k.” (1970), an incendiary Vietnam War allegory that led to the resignation of that year’s jury and “The Deer Hunter” (1979), which triggered the withdrawal of films from socialist countries, who regarded it as anti-communist propaganda. More recently, Jasmila Zbanic’s Golden Bear-winning “Grbavica” (2006), set during the Bosnian War, helped raise awareness about the systemic rape of 20,000 Bosniak Muslim women by Bosnian Serb forces; a decade later, Gianfranco Rosi’s “Fire at Sea” (2016), an urgent and gut-wrenching documentary about the Sicilian island of Lampedusa during the peak of the European migrant crisis, also took the festival’s main prize.
In real time, Wenders’ answer on the Berlinale podium was reduced to a soundbite on social media: “Wim Wenders: Cinema is not political.” Before long, people dug up statements that directly contradicted that point of view, including one from 1977 in which Wenders had bluntly asserted: “Every film is political.” The twittersphere was quick to brand Wenders a first-class hypocrite.
Those few minutes on February 12 set the tone for the ten days that followed by reigniting debates that have dogged the Berlinale since the 2024 edition, including the festival’s ability to guarantee free expression despite what the German government, the event’s main funder, considers inappropriate (and possibly illegal) speech about the Jewish State. With even greater difficulty than in years past, the Berlinale’s leadership struggled to get out from under the shadow of politics, trying in vain to shut the Pandora’s Box that had been opened during the opening press conference.
Jung, whose question launched a thousand tweets, was clearly being provocative, but I don’t think he set out to ensnare anybody. The real problem, and the greatest source of embarrassment for the festival, was how caught off guard everyone was by his question. Instead of articulating a position and sticking to it, the festival sleepwalked straight into a trap that it had laid for itself over the past two years.
When the 74th Berlin Film Festival took place in February 2024, Germany’s public — and widely commented on — argument about how much criticism of Israel and support for the Palestinians were acceptable — both morally and legally — was at its most intense. Emotions ran high, certainly for the large communities of Israelis and the Palestinians living in Berlin, but perhaps most of all for the Germans, who, especially in those early months after the October 7 attack, rushed to shut down many displays of solidarity with the Palestinians (including disrupting rallies with Jewish organizers) and to criminalize the slogan “From the River to the Sea,” interpreting it as a genocidal battle cry.
Against this backdrop, it was remarkable that “No Other Land,” about the destruction of a Palestinian village in the West Bank, took the festival’s documentary prize. The film went on to win an Oscar for its two directors, the Israeli Yuval Abraham and the Palestinian Basel Adra. (The significance of Israel and Palestine sharing their first Oscar has sadly been lost on many).
At the Berlinale’s closing ceremony in February 2023, Abraham used his acceptance speech to denounce a policy of apartheid in the West Bank and to call for a ceasefire in Gaza, statements that several German politicians called antisemitic and for which Abraham received death threats. Adra added it was difficult for him to celebrate when people in Gaza were “being slaughtered and massacred” and called for Germany to stop exporting weapons to Israel. When Claudia Roth, Germany’s then-commissioner for culture, was caught on camera applauding the speeches, she put out an Orwellian statement clarifying that she was only clapping for the Israeli director.
Ahead of the 2025 edition, the Berlinale posted a lengthy “FAQs Dialogue and Exchanges” to its website. But it did little to quell concerns about the Berlinale’s commitment to free speech or reassure skeptics that pro-Palestinian viewpoints would be welcome. It claimed that the wearing of kefiyyehs or watermelon pins or other signs of solidarity with Palestinians were not forbidden, but it urged caution with slogans, specifically phrase “From the River to the Sea,” given “the Holocaust and the country’s culture of remembrance and reconciliation.”
Some seized on this language as proof that the festival was actively working to block Palestinian voices. A boycott campaign called Strike Germany alleged that the Berlinale had denounced a “queer, Middle Eastern” part-time employee for using the verboten slogan in internal festival correspondence. There were calls to boycott the festival and anger about the scarcity of films from Palestinian perspectives in the program, particularly since there were two features about Israeli hostages taken on October 7, including “Holding Liat,” which was awarded the documentary prize that “No Other Land” had won the year before.
Generally, however, to the extent that there was a scandal at the 2025 Berlinale, it was a non-scandal, amplified by a media ecosystem that knows that manufacturing outrage is the easiest way to thrive in the attention economy.
Even The New York Times, known to be cautious to a fault, amplified the concerns of those who felt the Berlinale was downplaying the Palestinian perspective. In a 2025 “critic’s notebook,” the journalist Beatrice Loayza suggested that the festival’s decision to screen French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann’s Holocaust documentary “Shoah” somehow privileged the pro-Israel perspective. As evidence, she mentioned that Lanzmann, who died in 2018, was “a staunch supporter of Israel.” One would indeed be hard-pressed to find many 20th-century Jewish artists and intellectuals who did not support Israel. Did Loayza mean to imply that when film festivals screen work by Susan Sontag or Chantal Akerman critics should view it as a political statement?
After this year’s disastrous opening press conference, it became a near-daily ritual for the festival’s celebrity du jour to be asked about the Berlinale’s lack of support for the Palestinians. The actors who tried to dodge such questions came across as ignorant or callous. Clips of Ethan Hawke, Channing Tatum and Neil Patrick Harris struggling to answer questions about Gaza generated pretty much the only major headlines of the festival. Whenever someone demurred or declined to comment, it was often branded as silence or complicity.
There were also high-profile cancellations, including by the Indian writer Arundhati Roy, and an open letter signed by 81 film luminaries, including Tilda Swinton and Javier Bardem, demanding that the Berlinale “condemn the genocide in Gaza.”
As such developments threatened to dominate the festival, Tuttle, the artistic director, tried to stem the bleeding. Artists, she wrote in a statement, should not be “expected to speak on every political issue raised to them unless they want to.” But such comments, however sensible, did little to lower the temperature.
II
Europe’s oldest and most important film festivals, in Venice, Cannes, and Berlin, are sometimes referred to as the “Big Three.” Each came to life under dramatically different political circumstances. Il Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinemaografica di Venezia was founded in 1932 as both a cultural experiment and propaganda tool for Mussolini’s government. In its early years, it often awarded the major film productions of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. One of the festival’s early prize winners was Veit Harlan’s notoriously antisemitic “Jud Süss” (1940).
The idea to found a French film festival was a direct reaction to the fascists’ cultural influence in the realm of cinema. Cannes’ first edition was set to open on September 1, 1939, the day Germany invaded Poland. The festival’s debut was postponed until 1946, when, in the immediate postwar period, its primary ideological goal was to promote tolerance and international understanding.
Five years later, in a Berlin that was still largely rubble, Oscar Martay, Film Officer of the American military administration in Germany, proposed an international film festival that would be a “showcase of the free world.” Founded in the early years of the Cold War, the Berlinale was, from its inception, a tool of asserting American soft power and western cultural prestige.
In the decades since, Cannes, Venice and Berlin developed remarkably distinct identities and profiles. Collectively, they pointed world cinema — and those who cared about it — in bold new directions, regularly championing daring and often controversial film makers and movements. Their main prizes — the Palme d’Or, the Leone d’Oro and the Goldener Bär – awarded by juries composed of cinema luminaries, served to burnish filmmakers’ reputations.
Each festival also found a different register to respond to political turmoil and controversy. Venice, perhaps wary of being coopted by politics given its fascist origins, has tended to stay out of or to downplay politics. Cannes, which quickly became the most glamorous and, in some ways, the most purely cinephilic, likes to see itself as above politics, as if the calamities of the outside world must not trouble the beachfront paradise of the Croisette.
The Berlinale is not only the most political of the bunch: it is also the largest, with roughly 300 films screening over ten days. Much like the city itself, the festival is sprawling, energetic and often chaotic. It is also insistently unglamorous, often provocative and sometimes obscure, reflecting the ethos of experimentation that has made Berlin so welcoming for artists in the three and a half decades since the fall of the Wall.
I have attended the Berlinale nearly every year since 2008. The festival programs hundreds of titles across sections that pile up like verbs at the end of a German sentence. The result can feel less like a curated event than a test of stamina: less like a festival of handpicked films and more like a convention.
That would be fine — this has long been a maximalist festival — if the Berlinale were also reliably the place where major filmmakers want to debut their work. Lately that hasn’t been the case. The audience is still there; this year the festival sold 350,000 tickets, a record. Its public remains loyal and eager to crisscross Europe’s third-largest city in the dead of winter to satisfy their cinematic curiosity. What’s gone soft is the Berlinale’s ability to court the directors who set the agenda for world cinema.
Tuttle was hired three years ago with an explicit mandate to restore the festival’s prestige. It was a tall order even before Israel and Gaza-related controversies came to dominate her festival. Over the past decade, the film festival landscape has become brutally competitive. Cannes and Venice have grown only more dominant as global springboards: they don’t just host important films; they help make them important. Increasingly Berlin feels like the place where films land when the higher balconies are already booked.
Yet once upon a time — not too long ago, in fact — many of the world’s major directors braved the cold and gray to unveil their films here. Many of them walked off with the festival’s top prize, the Golden Bear, includingIngmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, Satyajit Ray and Robert Altman. More recently, the Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi and his compatriot Jafar Panahi scooped up the trophy. Farhadi went on to win back-to-back Academy Awards.
Both of those Iranian master filmmakers were mainstays during the long tenure of Dieter Kosslick, the Berlinale’s charismatic and fun-loving chief from 2001 to 2019. As a festival known for its ideological and political intensity neared the half-century mark, Kosslick opened the doors to however much pizzazz Berlin in February would allow.
Kosslick loved stars, parties and stunts; he helped keep the Berlinale socially loud and pleasantly unserious in a city that can be dour and deathly earnest about culture. While there was plenty of eye-rolling at his attention-grabbing tactics (including the notorious 2008 edition, which featured an unofficial rock-n-roll theme and appearances by the Rolling Stones, Patti Smith and Neil Young), few denied that Kosslick knew how to put on a good show.
Although there was habitual grousing about Kosslick’s taste in movies — he famously turned down Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s “The Lives of Others” and László Nemes’ “Son of Saul” for the competition; both went on to win Oscars — he also successfully courted some of the greatest living filmmakers, including Martin Scorsese, Terrence Malick, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, Wim Wenders, Lars von Trier, Mike Leigh, Béla Tarr, and Theo Angelopoulos.
After Kosslick’s last edition, the pendulum swung toward cinephile rigor under Carlo Chatrian, who came from Locarno and treated the Berlinale as a place where film should be taken more soberly. He got rid of the program devoted to new German films that was never one of the Berlinale’s strongest sidebars but was crucial for the local film industry. He also created an ill-defined competitive section for formally daring works, Encounters, that left many festivalgoers scratching their heads. Trying to advocate for artistic seriousness at the expense of star power struck many, including the cultural politicians, as arrogant and misguided. Five years into his mandate, Chatrian was fired before his term was up.
When Tuttle started her job last year, she inherited a fragmented festival that was big, public, political and increasingly peripheral in the premiere economy. In 2025, her biggest coup was securing the world premiere of Richard Linklater’s “Blue Moon.” Linklater, a frequent guest to the Berlinale (he won the Best Director Silver Lion for “Boyhood” in 2014), is very loyal to the festival and while I was delighted to discover his razor-sharp Lorenz Hart biopic there, I also suspect that launching one of the year’s best American films in Berlin eight months before its U.S. release date might have hurt its Oscar chances. (Although “Blue Moon” received positive reviews from the festival dailies and even won a prize, it’s fiendishly difficult for studios, and their marketing teams, to sustain hype about any film that debuts that long before awards season.)
III
On paper, this year’s line-up did not look very glamorous. There were only a handful of major filmmakers on the program and some of the starriest titles had already bowed elsewhere, including at Sundance. The opening film was Afghan director Shahrbanoo Sadat’s “No Good Men,” a gentle romantic comedy-drama set in a Kabul newsroom on the eve of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. That choice felt like a misstep. Not only was it a small film, entirely without stars (it features many non-professional actors), it was also disappointingly slight: a Middle East-set variation on “Broadcast News” that would have been at home in one of the festival’s smaller sections. (Two earlier films by Sadat screened at the Quinzaine des cineastes in Cannes.) It didn’t merit the red-carpet treatment.
Elsewhere on the program, however, there was cause for optimism.
In 2025, the Berlinale lost out on the two best German films of the year, Mascha Schilinski’s “Sound of Falling”and Christian Petzold’s “Miroirs No. 3,” both of which found eager audiences in Cannes. This year, the Berlinale’s 22-film-strong competition included new work by some of Germany’s most interesting filmmakers, including Angela Schanelec, an enigmatic formalist, and Ilker Çatak, whose previous film, “The Teacher’s Lounge” was a surprise hit here in 2023 and wound up with an Oscar nomination for Best International Film. Finding both directors in competition shows that Tuttle understands that championing German auteurs should be one of her festival’s chief priorities — discovering new homegrown artistic voices might be a path to regaining lost prestige.
Çatak’s new film, “Yellow Letters,” about a theater director and his actress wife whose work runs afoul of a repressive regime in Turkey, wound up with this year’s Golden Bear. A much weaker film than “The Teacher’s Lounge,” it was nevertheless one of the stronger entries in competition. It was also one of the festival’s most explicitly political titles. That Wenders’ jury awarded it best in show suggested they understood their mandate and the festival’s history.
The most immediately striking thing about “Yellow Letters” is that it was filmed entirely in Germany, with Berlin standing in for Ankara and Hamburg doubling for Istanbul. The choice is neither as disconcerting nor as distracting as one might assume. Germany is home to the largest Turkish diaspora and its two biggest cities are full of Turkish neighborhoods with mosques, supermarkets and electronic stores, which helps make the city-swapping utterly believable. After a while, you completely forget about it. Özgü Namal and Tansu Biçer give powerful performances as the artistic couple struggling to support each other and raise their teenage daughter as their professional lives unravel. But this severe, dialogue-heavy political drama often feels blunt and programmatic. Too often, the protagonists perform their creative idealism and moral outrage rather than inhabit them. The result often chilly and unconvincing: more a parable than a character study.
I would have liked to see Schanelec’s “My Wife Cries” honored by the jury. Schanelec, a key figure of the Berlin School that emerged in the 1990s (Petzold also belongs to the loose-knit movement), is an enigmatic and formally-rigorous filmmaker. Her previous feature, “Music,” an arrestingly cryptic riff on the myth of Orpheus, screened here in 2023 and won the award for best screenplay. “My Wife Cries,” about a morose crane operator in Berlin whose wife confesses to having an affair with her dance partner, is an austere and deadpan portrait of a collapsing relationship. Schanelec and her actors excavate their emotional wreckage through clipped, artificial dialogue and long static takes.
I was glad to see some of my favorite competition films walk away with several trophies. “Everybody Digs Bill Evans,” took the Best Director trophy for Grant Gee. Gee is best known for the 1998 documentary “Meeting People is Easy,” about the English band Radiohead and the tour for their seminal album “OK Computer.” Nearly three decades later, he has made an achingly atmospheric, beautifully acted, and persuasively musical film about the great jazz pianist’s crisis following the sudden death of his bassist, Scott LaFaro. Largely shot in luminous black and white, with effectively jarring intrusions of color – including a D.A. Pennebaker-style montage of New York City and some flash-forwards to Evans in the 70s and 80s — the film ranks among the best artist biopics in recent memory.
An opening sequence that deftly cross-cuts between the Bill Evans Trio’s legendary concerts on June 25, 1961, at the Village Vanguard, (recorded and released on the albums “Waltz with Debbie” and “Sunday at the Village Vanguard”) and the lethal car-crash, immediately establishes the film’s off-kilter, syncopated tone of bleak beauty. The Norwegian actor Anders Danielsen Lie, best-known for Joachim Trier’s “The Worst Person in the World,” is both sympathetic and infuriating as the musician responding to a creative crisis by shutting the world out. The actor that wows, however, is Bill Pullman as Evans’ bitter, boozing father. In a memorably bleak scene, Pullman, now 72, leads an Irish pub in a rousingly sad rendition of Danny Boy. Evans’ father and brother (Barry Ward as an Organization Man) find the strength to lift the musician out of the gutter, but only at great personal cost. There’s no shortage of films about self-destructive artists; part of what distinguishes “Everybody Digs Bill Evans” is its refusal to romanticize suffering as a prerequisite for artistic greatness.
My other favorite film of the festival was Lance Hammer’s “Queen at Sea.” Hammer, an American director whose only previous feature, “Ballast,” screened here in 2008, would have been a more deserving Golden Bear recipient than Çatak. It was gratifying to see “Queen at Sea” pick up multiple prizes at the closing ceremony, including the Silver Bear Jury Prize.
Set in an unremittingly grey London, this shattering family drama follows a middle-aged academic (Juliette Binoche) caring for an elderly mother with dementia (Anna Calder-Marshall) who lives with her stepfather (Tom Courtenay) in an old house with creaky staircases. In the film’s shocking first scene, Binoche walks in on the octogenarians having sex. Convinced that her stepfather is taking advantage of someone who is unable to give consent, Binoche calls the police on him, which sets off a chain of events that spiral out of her control. It’s a closely observed and mournful film about love and aging that skirts sentimentality. Like Michael Haneke’s “Amour,” another portrait of love at the end of life, what makes “Queen at Sea” so devastatingly effective are its superbly realized performances. Courtenay and Carder-Marshall shared the Berlinale’s Silver Bear for Best Supporting Performance. (Since 2021, the Berlinale gives out gender neutral awards for lead and supporting performance).
IV
During the Berlinale’s closing ceremony on February 21, Wenders offered a revised — and polished — version of remarks he made at the opening press conference. While the “language of cinema” has long been the “predominant language of the Berlinale,” he also acknowledged that “the language of politics has also always been present as Berlin always was and still is an enormously politicized place.”
“The language of cinema is empathetic. The language of social media is effective. We need to talk about that artificial discrepancy that happens here in Berlin,” he continued, adding: “Activists are fighting, mainly on the internet, for humanitarian causes, namely the dignity and protection of human life. These are our causes as well, as the Berlinale films clearly show.”
And for an all-too-brief moment it looked like maybe the festival had finally found a stable footing.
That is, until the Syrian-Palestinian director Abdallah Alkhatib was awarded the prize for best first film for“Chronicles From the Siege,” a fiction feature inspired by his 2021 documentary, “Little Palestine: Diary of a Siege” (2021), a harrowing look at daily life in the Damascus district of Yarmouk, one of the world’s largest Palestinian refugee camps, which was besieged by Bashar Al-Assad’s regime during Syria’s brutal civil war. (The first film prize was not awarded by Wenders’ jury).
Alkhatib bounded onstage with a black-and-white Palestinian keffiyeh draped over his shoulder and proceeded to make an impassioned speech. “Some people told me: maybe you have to be careful before you say what I want to say now, because you are a refugee in Germany, and there are so many red lines. But I don’t care. I care about my people, about Palestine,” Alkhatib said. He called the German government “partners in the genocide in Gaza by Israel.”
“I believe you are intelligent enough to recognize this truth, but you choose to not care,” he said, adding that “we will remember everyone who stood with us, and we will remember everyone who stood against us, against our right to live with dignity, or who choose silence or choose to be silent,” before holding up a Palestinian flag. The speech was met with applause and scattered booing. Germany’s Environmental Minister walked out in protest.
On its closing night, the festival found itself with a fresh scandal on its hands: a scandal that was amplified several days later when Germany’s large circulation tabloid BILD published a photo that had been taken during the press conference for “Chronicles From the Siege” with Tuttle posing with the film team, several of whose members were wearing keffiyahs or holding Palestinian flags. The tabloid, which is known both for its muckraking and its militantly pro-Israel stance, called it a “propaganda photo” and claimed that Tuttle was about to be fired for platforming hate speech at the Berlinale. The paper also reported that Germany’s Federal Commissioner for Culture and the Media, the conservative politician Wolfram Weimer, had called an emergency meeting of the festival’s advisory board to discuss the “future direction of the Berlinale.” In remarks to Berlin’s parliament, the city’s mayor said that antisemitic and anti-Israel propaganda had no place at the Berlinale.
For the next week, speculation swirled that Tuttle’s head was on the chopping block, which fueled a groundswell of support for the beleaguered artistic director, including from several of the signatories of the letter circulated at the start of the festival.
“An international film festival is not a diplomatic instrument; it is a democratic cultural space worthy of protection. Its strength lies in its ability to hold divergent perspectives and to give visibility to a plurality of voices,” read a new open letter that was signed by Todd Haynes, Nadav Lapid, Maren Ade, Tilda Swinton and nearly 2,500 other film professionals.
Daniel Kelhmann, one of today’s leading German writers, argued in a statement put out by PEN Germany that Tuttle’s dismissal would be “the greatest catastrophe in German cultural policy since the search of Heinrich Böll’s home in 1972,” a reference to the raid on the German novelist’s summer house (several months before Böll won the Nobel Prize for literature) carried out by police after the Axel Springer press, the conservative publisher that owns BILD, had dropped hints that the writer might be sheltering members of the left-wing terrorist organization the Red Army Faction.
In a German radio interview, Kehlmann elaborated that he found it risible that Weimer, who has positioned himself as an anti-cancel culture warrior, would engage in the same coercive tactics he decries. “I don’t want to live in such a country,” Kehlmann said.
In early March, after a second meeting of the festival’s advisory board, it was announced that Tuttle would stay in her job — with strings attached. Germany’s ministry of culture recommended changes to the advisory board and a new code of conduct to combat antisemitism. Though details have yet to emerge, imposing these conditions may make the festival a less attractive place for filmmakers. It is also infantilizing and humiliating, especially since it flies in the face of what Tuttle argued throughout this year’s festival: the Berlinale’s complete independence from the German government. As she put in the Hollywood Reporter interview, “What we do, what we say, is entirely up to us. We don’t get missives. We don’t get directives at all.”
It’s going to be very difficult for her to claim that in the future. And although she’s kept her head, it’s hard for me to imagine that Tuttle isn’t conflicted about staying in this job. In an interview with Variety, Tuttle likened the Berlinale to a “lightning rod for political controversy.” Well, better to be a lightning rod for political controversy for having taken the political issues of our age seriously rather than inspiring clickbait rage by skirting or sidestepping those issues.
The Berlinale is and always has been a political film festival; it’s no use to try and wish that burden away. But the festival’s political identity is strongest when controversy is not the end of the story, and when political urgency is not mistaken for moral simplification. Wim Wenders was surely right to insist that cinema does not do the work of politicians. Its work is stranger, slower, and often more durable.
That is what the Berlinale did in 2012 when it boldly programmed a raft of documentaries about the upheavals in Egypt, Yemen, and Syria that brought home the dashed hopes of the Arab Spring with more immediacy, complexity, and empathy than any contemporary newspaper or magazine article.
The Berlinale does not need to choose between being politically serious and being serious about cinema. At its best, the two have been inseparable. The Berlinale has thrived when it has trusted films to complicate the headlines rather than illustrate them and has asked audiences to sit with contradiction rather than receive confirmation. The festival’s task is not to explicitly endorse political viewpoints. It is to find the filmmakers who can look at history while it is still unfolding and make art that neither simplifies nor looks away.