Essai | Discours

:: Tilda Swinton [Berlinale 2025]

Considérant que les discours prononcés lors de la Berlinale sont d’un courage infini et d’une nécessité absolue, cet article leur cède la place pour garder une trace, transmettre ce que l’histoire et la culture essayeront bientôt d’effacer. L’article « De la censure à la résistance » donne des éléments de contexte et développe une analyse autour des interventions qui sont ici retranscrites dans leur intégralité. Les mots qui les composent comme les corps qui les profèrent, incarnent tout ce que le cinéma a d’indomptable.

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Jun Li, réalisateur de Queerpanorama

Jun Li: As you watch this film, millions of Palestinian people are suffocating under Israel's brutal settler-colonial state, funded by the West. The German administration, along with its cultural institutions, including the Berlinale, are contributing in one form or another to the amplified genocide and brutal killing and erasure of the Palestinian people.

Public: Free Palestine from Hamas?

Jun Li: The German people must continue fighting for your freedom of speech when talking about Palestine in a clearly authoritarian, fascist, and scary political climate. Our film is about freedom, expression, and liberation. We are not free until we are all free, whether you are queer or Palestinian.

Public: Why do it? Come on.

Jun Li: This film calls for everyone in this room to honor the innocent Palestinian children, mothers, fathers, and siblings who have lost their lives and livelihoods to the German-backed occupation since 1948. "Never again" includes Palestinian lives. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.
 

:: Queerpanorama (Jun Li, 2025) [Good Sin Production / La Fonte]

Kinga Michalska, réalisatrice de Bedrock (Panorama / Berlinale)

Kinga Michalska : This film was a very difficult journey — one through which I learned about the ubiquitous Jewish graves that we live on in Poland, as well as the extent of Polish complicity in the Holocaust, and the Polish-led pogroms that took place before, during, and after the war. I believe that healing begins with acknowledging the truth in all its complexity. I also hope this film invites you to reflect on your own position on the land you call home, wherever that may be.

While making this film, I never imagined it would lead me to confront new cycles of violence — cycles that the land is still a witness to today. As we were filming in 2022 in eastern Poland, a gigantic wall topped with barbed wire was erected to deny refuge to a new group of "others." I couldn’t ignore it, and I began to learn more about the ongoing humanitarian crisis at the Polish-Belarusian border, where today, hunted migrants retrace the same steps that Jewish people once took in search of safety.

So, eight years later, what have we learned? This film is rooted in its Polish context, but it also invites us to reflect on the world around us — a world where we see the rise of nationalism, fascism, and white supremacy, and where crimes against humanity are committed in plain sight.

The story of my film is anchored here, but nothing exists in a vacuum. We began editing the film in the fall of 2023, just before October 7th —a day that marked the deadliest attack on Jewish people since the Holocaust, with almost 1,200 victims. And as we continued editing over the following year and a half, the world would also witness the genocide of the Palestinian people— with 46,000 Palestinians murdered, including 16,000 children.

As a filmmaker who grapples with questions of accountability and complicity, I cannot help but ask: What does normal life look like after so much unimaginable suffering and loss? What does life after a ceasefire look like? And how much time —how many generations— will it take to rebuild not just homes, but also trust, memory, and safety?

Public : Bring the hostages home now.

Kinga Michalska : Yes — all the hostages, both Israeli and Palestinian. I open this question to all of us: How do we live with what has been done?

Public : Question, please. How can you speak about genocide in Gaza?

Public : Because that’s what it is.

Danae Elon : As a Jew and a former Israeli, watching this film for the first time —and as a producer in this theater— one of the strongest realizations I had was this: Because Israel has never reckoned with the expulsion of the Palestinian people in 1948, and because of the lies we have been fed, an entire country has been enabled to believe that what is happening in Gaza right now is not genocide.

:: Bedrock (Kinga Michalska, 2025) [Filmoption]

Jakob Krese, réalisateur de Ceasefire (Berlinale Shorts)

While mainstream media still refuses to call it a genocide. German state actors and institutions are silencing and repressing many who are showing solidarity with the Palestinian people, many of them Jewish voices. Right now in Berlin, it is illegal to even chant in Arabic at demonstrations. I celebrate the boycotts happening all over the city. I as well celebrate those who decided to participate in the festival and to speak out despite all contradictions. There's fear and confusion among us. Some who spoke out already have already filled the consequences of it, not from the Berlinale itself, but from within the film industry. The censorship is more complex, weaved within our own power relationships. What is happening here is not normal. The German society is frightening me. It reminds me of what my mother told me about the 90s and the Balkans when suddenly old friends become nationalists and aggressive behavior become part of everyday life. We know by now that for a genocide, we don't only need those who are carrying it out, but we need the majority to be silent. The genocide in Bosnia was only stopped when it was understood and recognized as a genocide. The least we can do is to call it for what it is. We owe it to Hazira and every genocide survivor. Let's call it a genocide no matter who is carrying it out and no matter where it's carried out. Never again means never again for everyone and everywhere.

:: Ceasefire (Jakob Krese, 2025) [Majmun Films]

Manuel Embalse, monteur de Under the Flags, the Sun (Panorama / Berlinale)

Being a Latin American editor of documentaries, this is the first time I have hesitated to say what I think in a film festival. As you have just seen, this is a film about Paraguayan memory, but I think of it as a fragment of the world's collective memory. In 2025, Paraguay is still ruled by the same party that the dictator Stroessner belonged to; in Argentina, my country, President Milei, faithful servant of Trump and Elon Musk, destroyed all funding for culture, science, education and health, attacks the LGBTQ+ community, attacks indigenous communities across the country, and he's handing over our natural resources to the United States and Israel and so many more. I'm Jewish and today I'm in Germany, which is materially supporting Israel's genocide of the Palestinian people. As a film worker, I celebrate the boycotts that are taking place in the city. I also celebrate, even if there is fear and confusion, that those of us who decided to participate in the festival despite the contradictions, have organized ourselves. I remember a text by Sebald, a German writer, who developed the concept of collective amnesia in his book On the Natural History of Destruction :  

“The reconstruction of the country after the devastation wrought by the enemies, prohibited any look backward. It did so through the inmense amount of labor and the creation of a new, faceless reality, provoking that the population sees exclusively towards the future, and remain silence about the past.”

But also, as an editor, I know that with cinema we can do something about this collective amnesia, and I'm grateful to have been part of Juanjo's film to try to rebuild the lost memory of Paraguay. Free Palestine and let's keep saying NO to the ultra-right in the world!

:: Under the Flags, the Sun (Juanjo Pereira, 2025) [Cine Mío / MaravillaCine / et al.]

Discours d’acceptation de l’Ours d’honneur par Tilda Swinton

Dear fellow humans. Now, as then, in a present, when it is perhaps never been more pressing to consider, to weigh with reverence and maturity what sovereignty means to humans, what history and legacy and an evolved culture might be worth to our sense of ourselves and even what being human means and is worth at all. We can head for the great independent state of cinema and rest there an unlimited realm, innately inclusive, immune to efforts of occupation, colonization takes over ownership or the development of Riviera property. A borderless realm and with no policy of exclusion, persecution or deportation. Let's keep looking up. With all my love. Tilda.

Déclaration de On Strike Berlinale

We cannot deny that so much great work has been shown at the Berlinale over the years. We also cannot deny that the Berlinale, like the rest of the state funded cultural scene in Berlin and Germany, has chosen to unquestionably promote the policies of the German Foreign Ministry during the genocide in Palestine. Either through its active support, its silence, or its silencing of critical voices. We also cannot deny that Germany funds cheerleads and whitewashes the ongoing genocide in Palestine's Gaza. We cannot deny that due to hegemonic support of this mass murder, the world is changing and so is the cultural world. And we as workers and participants in both of these worlds must change too. The bottom line is, while genocide is perpetuated, business as usual within complicit institutions is unacceptable. German cultural institutions have actively facilitated the censorship and self-censorship of the over 200 cultural workers and academics canceled in Germany since October 7th, 2023. Such cancellations are only an intensification of previous policies, to say nothing for the countless people who were not invited to show their work to begin with. This could be due to something as simple as a like on social media, or a post in which they express something as simple as calling for justice in Palestine. So you, the silent decision makers in Germany's cultural institutes, also play a part in the whitewashing of Israel's genocide. You are the curators deciding who were Germany's contemporary degenerate artists. Long before October 7th, 2023, we were outraged about the colonization of Palestine. Since October 7th, we are more outraged than ever. Outraged at Israel's killing spree. Outraged at the total impunity Israel has been given on a global scale. Outraged by how states fund arm and excuse Israel's destruction of life in Palestine, as well as in Lebanon, Yemen and elsewhere. We are outraged at how Arab regimes talk of standing with the Palestinians while enabling Israel in its genocidal warfare. While the Berlinale celebrates itself for being diverse, independent and daring, for pressing political subject matters of the films and it platforms. It makes one exception: filmmakers and films that have a stance critical of Israel. This double standard kills. It kills lives. The German government, its institutions and the press cannot admit the blatant annihilation of life in Gaza because of the exception is framing of the Holocaust above all other such atrocities in history. This, in turn causes Germany to reiterate the people it once committed genocide against falsely conflated with the State of Israel can commit no evil, certainly not their own genocide. We stand against these lies. We stand against the culture that obeys the murderer and its collaborators. For culture is not innocent within that process. We want to create new spaces, new communities find new ways of existing outside these circuits of lies and murder. Today, we are deeply humbled by the incredible perseverance, the resilience to live the ongoing resistance of Palestinians. This event is not an institution. This is a decentralized, non-institutional form of making our spaces and conversations is a significant one, as the Berlinale and all other German institutions consistently make themselves insignificant. Our events will take place on a donation basis and our work is voluntary. We want to honor the filmmakers with nominal fees, and we will forward the dominant portion of donations to people that this government starves, make, suffer and tries to annihilate on a daily basis. We are some of the contemporary degenerate artists. Welcome and please, join us!

:: Autocollants distribués à On Strike

Mackenzie Reid Rostad, réalisateur et cofondateur de la Barlinale

There is another big film fest going on right now… but this is a counter festival…

To know what this means, we need to understand something about festivals more generally… particularly that most do not pay filmmakers

If you look up our competitors’ screening fees, the first thing you’ll find is a list of ticket prices for the public. And if you scroll through the terms and conditions for filmmakers participating, the only mention of fees are those paid by filmmakers to the festival in the form of submission fees.

When the TIFF first began charging submission fees in the 90s, their hope was that this financial barrier would deter amateurs and see a fall in submissions. It didn’t work, yet the practice persists, as the revenue stream generated by submissions is now a staple business practice for festivals….

Festivals, which are likely to have a majority of their programme in place, long before the empty promise of the open call prays on the aspirations of filmmakers. And “actually paying a fee would indicate that a lowly unsolicited submission was not to be seriously considered.”

These are facts. They need to be faced. So for the sake of clarity, let’s name these festivals…

Festivals that take more than they give are parasitic. They stunt the emergence of cine-scenes and a truly independent cinema, free from the dependence of projection.

Our competitor recently removed “freedom of speech” from its core values and the censorship found at that festival is underpinned by a broader landscape of exploitation. The precarity of festival staff and the wholesale inability to recognize filmmakers as workers, undermines our ability to speak up. 

In light of the blacklisting of artists that voice solidarity with Palestine, scant or no screening fees leaves descendent voices ever more exposed the whims of government funding bodies and private capitalists.

Barlinale stands with Palestine and all cultural workers whose lives and livelihoods have been threatened by the institutions complicit in the ongoing occupation and genocide. 

Barlinale is a counter festival and this means all festivals. I’m here to name them without hesitation or doubt in my mind…

Celeste Rojas Mugica, réalisatrice, membre de Cineastas por Palestina, invitée à Doc Station (Berlinale Talents)

I cannot stand here defending this project, which resonates so strongly with the recent past and the devastating present we are experiencing, without expressing my solidarity and our collective support for the Palestinian people in the face of the ongoing genocide. As a member of Cineastas por Palestina, a film collective from Chile, home to the largest Palestinian diaspora outside the Middle East, and on behalf of all of us, with the support of my colleagues on this stage, we denounce the ongoing genocide facilitated by the financial and military support of powers such as the United States and Germany. In 2023, Germany approved the export of arms to Israel valued at €326.5 million, and in October 2024, it announced that it would continue to send arms, arguing that it is a matter of state policy and Germany's historical responsibility, despite having signed the Arms Trade Treaty, which prohibits the sale of arms to countries committing genocide. The Berlinale Film Festival, one of the most important cultural events in the country and the world, has not provided a space to actively speak out against these violations. As artists committed to history and the present, and to the cultural spaces we actively want to inhabit, we refuse to succumb to paralyzing apathy. We take this opportunity to speak loud and clear: Palestine resists, and the world watches. End the genocide. End the colonial occupation. Free Palestine. Viva Palestina Libre.

:: Una Sombra Oscilante (Celeste Rojas Mugica, 2025) [Bomba Cine / Eaux Vives Productions]

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