An emotional Tricia Tuttle spoke at the closing ceremony of a challenging Berlinale, one dominated by political discourse.
Tuttle admitted to feeling “teary” during her speech before the evening’s awards were handed out and acknowledged that “this year’s Berlinale has taken place in a world that feels raw and fractured, and many people arrived carrying a lot of grief and anger and some urgency about the world that we’re living in right now, and that takes place outside of the cinema walls as well as inside of the cinemas. And these feelings are really real, and they belong in our community. And we hear you.”
She continued: “We’ve also been publicly challenged this year: and that’s good. It may not always feel good, but it is good because it means that the Berlinale matters to people. We’re a very visible cultural institution. We’re an institution that people expect a lot of, and we’re living in a polarized moment, and I think we all need to hold the fact that we’re living in a polarized moment and embrace the community that we built together, because criticism and speaking up is part of democracy, so is disagreement, and we respect people speaking out, because it takes a lot of courage to do it sometimes, and we don’t always agree with every claim that’s made about us. But what I’m really, really proud of is that over these 10 days, the Berlinale has remained what it was set out to be, which is a place where people gather in public and where everyone is welcome across difference, to sit together in the dark and look at a world through the eyes of other people.”
She added: “Free expression at the Berlinale isn’t one voice, it’s many voices, and sometimes they’re calm and sometimes they’re angry and sometimes they seem like they’re silent, but they’re speaking through cinema. And these voices can also be contradictory, and a festival like this cannot and does not resolve the world’s conflicts, but it’s a space where we can bring complexity, and we can listen to each other, and we can humanize each other.”
She ended by saying: “If this Berlinale has been emotionally charged, that’s not a failure of the Berlinale, and it’s not a failure of cinema; that is the Berlinale doing its job, and it’s cinema doing its job.”
Tuttle’s second edition at the helm has been a rockier ride that her inaugural edition in 2025, following a backlash over comments by jury president Wim Wenders in the opening press conference nine days ago in which he appeared to say that filmmakers should stay out of politics, although the meaning of his words is still up for debate.
That beginning set off ten days of actors and filmmakers being asked at press conferences for their stances on global political issues, and social media angst over those responses. More than 100 actors and filmmakers, including A-listers Tilda Swinton and Javier Bardem, wrote an open letter criticising the festival’s position on the Israel Gaza conflict.
The festival sought to quieten frustration by issuing a lengthy statement in the middle of the edition. Tuttle also defended the festival and its jury in multiple interviews.
English (US) ·