BERLIN, GERMANY:

The controversy at this year’s Berlinale crystallised early when jury president Wim Wenders, responding to press questions about Gaza, suggested that filmmakers ought to “stay out of politics” — that work which becomes “dedicatedly political” crosses into the territory of politicians rather than artists.

The remark, delivered at the festival’s opening, was less a considered aesthetic position than an inadvertent self-exposure: inviting immediate scrutiny of precisely the institutional silences it sought to justify, and within days drawing a level of public dissent that no amount of subsequent clarification could contain.

Famed Indian author Arundhati Roy withdrew from her scheduled appearance, describing the suggestion that artists should disengage from political catastrophe as “unconscionable”, a response that carried the weight of a body of work built on the conviction that literature and political life are irreducibly entangled, and that one cannot be sanitised from the other without compromise to both.

Next, Tunisian filmmaker and director of “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” Kaouther Ben Hania declined to accept the “Most Valuable Film” prize at the Cinema for Peace gala held alongside the festival, leaving the award on stage with the explicit argument that peace without accountability is an empty formulation. A significant gesture in a room full of the industry’s most powerful people, it became one of the festival’s most memorable talking points of the week.

More than 80 filmmakers and actors, Javier Bardem and Tilda Swinton among them, co-signed an open letter condemning what they described as the festival’s “institutional silence” on Gaza. Its central argument — that failing to condemn mass civilian suffering is not neutrality but a form of complicity — placing the festival’s leadership in an increasingly untenable position, particularly for an institution that has historically presented itself as politically engaged.

Funding, Power, and the Limits of Neutrality

The debate acquires additional texture when viewed through the structure of how Berlinale is financed. The festival draws 40% of its funding from the German federal government and the Berlin Senate, a dependency that situates it firmly within the apparatus of state cultural policy rather than at any meaningful remove from it. This is not incidental: public subsidy implies civic accountability. The claim that a state-supported institution occupies a position above or outside politics is, at minimum, difficult to sustain.

Alongside public funds, the Berlinale is underwritten by a portfolio of corporate partnerships that includes CUPRA and TikTok, among others. Each operates within industries — namely automotive manufacturing and surveillance-adjacent technology — whose environmental and social externalities sit in variable tension with the kinds of stories the festival tends to champion on screen.

This is not a contradiction unique to Berlinale, but it is one the institution rarely examines with any transparency. To accept sponsorship is to accept integration into specific networks of capital and influence; the honest question is not whether that integration exists, but whether it is meaningfully acknowledged.

Berlinale leadership responded to the mounting criticism with a statement framing artistic autonomy as freedom from compelled speech — arguing that artists “should not be expected to speak on every political issue raised to them.”