The 76th edition of the Berlinale, the country’s largest film festival and one of the main cinematographic events in the world, third in importance only behind Cannes and Venice, is currently being held in Germany, in the capital.

And there is a lot of talk about it not so much for the films presented – one thing to reflect on would be, for example, that no Italian work appears in the main competition – but mainly because of some controversies. During the usual opening press conference, last Thursday 12 February, a response given by the jury president Wim Wenders, long-time German director of iconic films such as Paris, Texas, The Sky Over Berlin and also Perfect Days, which was widely seen here in Italy for a couple of years, caused a lot of discussion.

Pressed by an activist and blogger with a question regarding the German government’s positions on the issue of Gaza and Israel, Wenders responded: “Films can change the world, but not in a political sense. No film has ever truly changed a politician’s point of view. However, we can influence the way people imagine their lives. There is a big discrepancy between those who aspire to live their lives freely and governments who have different opinions. And I think films can highlight this discrepancy.” Then he added the most damning part: “We have to stay out of politics. If we make intentionally political films, we enter the field of politics. But we are the counterweight to politics. We are the opposite of politics.”

The media storm

This response, of which mostly the second part was relaunched far and wide in newspapers and social media, was read as a failure to take a position and indeed an attempt to silence the far from resolved Palestinian issue. It didn’t take long for the storm to break out.

The day after the press conference, the Indian writer Arundhati Roy, who was due to present the restored version of In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, a 1989 TV film she wrote and starred in, in Berlin, even announced her withdrawal from the festival. “Hearing them say that art shouldn’t be political blew my mind,” commented Roy, who then said she was “shocked and disgusted” by this attempt to “shut down a debate on a crime against humanity, even as it is unfolding before our eyes in real time.”

From a certain point of view it is quite clear what Wenders meant: cinema, which is an art, discusses and influences the surrounding world with tools different from those of politics in the strict sense. The fact that the statement was extracted, reduced and relaunched certainly did not help the understanding of his thoughts, cutting out and decorating the controversy ad hoc to make it suitable for immediate virality and easy indignation.

Institutional shyness

Not that this completely exonerates the excessive shyness of Wenders, who has a lot of worldly experience on his shoulders, to be honest they appeared a little too out of line on this occasion. In any case, the particular surrounding context must not be understood, but at least taken into consideration. That is, that of a German author invested with a prestigious institutional position in a country like Germany, a nation constantly lacking in relation to issues linked to the Israeli state and the historical legacy of the Shoah. To be clear, Germany, together with France and Italy, is among the states that recently asked for the removal of the UN rapporteur Francesca Albanese, systematically accused of anti-Semitism.

A shyness, that of Wenders, which however is out of place with the very identity of the Berlinale, which among the major festivals is the one that has most often welcomed and valorised instances of courageous artistic progressivism – since 2021 it has introduced a single award for the best acting performance, without distinction of gender – and of clear political positioning.

Only two years ago in Berlin the documentary No Other Land was awarded and celebrated, even on that occasion with various controversies, a film that would become an Oscar winner in 2025 and which tells of the Israeli occupation in the West Bank – and of which one of the authors, Hamdan Ballal, in recent days, was once again harassed and attacked by Jewish settlers with the approval of the Israeli army.

Refocus

Anyway, this story shows us a couple of things. The first is that artists are now asked to always take sides on everything, and this is a problem. In the days following the brutal press conference, the artistic director of the Berlinale, Tricia Tuttle, released an official note in which she observed that “directors are increasingly expected to answer any question they are asked. They are criticized if they don’t answer. They are criticized if they answer and we don’t like what they say”.

A mechanism that in fact always seems on the verge of jamming, assuming it hasn’t already done so. A short circuit that has to do more with the chronic distortion of the information system, always in the strenuous search for the quote on which to grind clicks and likes, than with political and ideological issues in themselves.

The second is that in times of free-range neo-fascism and neo-imperialism it is anything but a sin or banal to plant the flag, but the risk of cover automatism is also just around the corner. The clumsy – if not paraculonic – declaration of making “apolitical” art by the actor Neil Patrick Harris or the glossing over of the Oscar-winning actress Michelle Yeoh (awarded with the Golden Bear for Lifetime Achievement) are two sides of the same coin, as is the easy applause reserved in another press conference for Tom Morello, guitarist of Rage Against the Machine in Berlin to present the documentary The Ballad of Judas Priest, who said: “What a historical period we are living in, in which you can make a documentary about one of your favorite bands and fight fascism at the same time.”

Perhaps we should all, with effort and courage, look for adversaries to point to and symbols to identify with that go beyond thirty seconds of reel or a quote painted on Canva. So, perhaps, we would go back to rediscover which are the true opponents and which are the true symbols.