Germany’s minister of state for culture has insisted she was only clapping the Israeli but not the Palestinian half of a film-making duo that won one of the major awards at the politically charged closing ceremony for the Berlin film festival.
At Saturday night’s awards event, the Palestinian film-maker Basel Adra and the Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham jointly took to the stage on Saturday to accept the best documentary prize for their joint film No Other Land, which charts the eradication of Palestinian villages in the West Bank.
Adra said he struggled to celebrate his film’s success while people in Gaza were “being slaughtered and massacred”, and urged Germany to cease arms exports to Israel. Speaking immediately afterwards, Abraham decried a “situation of apartheid” that meant that his film-making partner did not enjoy the same voting rights and freedom of movement even though they lived only 30 minutes apart.
Abraham ended his acceptance speech with a call for a ceasefire in Gaza, and for a “political solution to end the occupation”. The moment was one of several on the night in which film-makers expressed solidarity with the Palestinian cause in the conflict. The massacre perpetrated by Hamas militants on 7 October was mentioned once, in an opening statement by the Berlinale co-director, Mariëtte Rissenbeek, that called for the release of Israeli hostages.
In Germany, where the government has tacked strongly behind the Israeli government since the start of the conflict, politicians were quick to condemn the event. Berlin’s conservative mayor, Kai Wegner, described the speeches at the Berlinale closing ceremony as an “intolerable relativisation”.
“The full responsibility for the deep suffering in Israel and the Gaza strip lies with Hamas,” Wegner wrote on X.
Even though the 10-day film festival’s winners are chosen by independent juries made up of international film professionals, opposition politicians also blamed Germany’s federal commissioner for culture, the Green party politician Claudia Roth, as being responsible for the comments made on-stage.
A delegate for the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) called for Roth’s resignation, while a politician for the Free Democratic party (FDP) proposed that the film festival’s state funding be withdrawn.
The Berlinale, one of the big three European film festivals alongside Cannes and Venice, was financed by the German state with about €12.9m this year, roughly a third of its overall budget.
Roth reacted on Monday by issuing a statement that called the statements at the gala “shockingly one-sided and characterised by deep hatred of Israel”, saying the lack of a mention of Hamas’s terror attack was “not acceptable”.
Footage of the awards ceremony, however, put further pressure on the minister of state: in a panoramic shot of the auditorium at the end of Adra and Abraham’s acceptance speech, Roth and Wegner are clearly visible clapping their hands.
In a statement on X on Monday, Roth’s office tried to clarify that her applause “was directed at the Jewish-Israeli journalist and filmmaker Yuval Abraham, who spoke out in favour of a political solution and a peaceful co-existence in the region”.
While the conflict in the Middle East divides opinion across western societies, it is proving especially explosive in Germany’s culture sector, where a strong pro-Israel consensus across the main political parties and media publishers is rubbing up against a more politically heterogenous crowd of international artists, who have been drawn to Berlin by its liberal reputation and generous cultural subsidies.
In a separate development, the Berlin film festival’s directors announced on Monday that it had filed criminal charges after the hacking of its Panorama section’s Instagram account, which was used to post messages in support of Palestine. Under German law, at least one of the slogans posted can be classified as antisemitic and illegal.
One of the images posted on Sunday showed what appeared to be Palestinian children next to the message “Ceasefire now – Stop the genocide in Gaza”, while another read: “Gaza, mon amour – End the German-funded state terror”.
A third picture, showing a man on a horse, contained the words “Free Palestine – from the river to the sea”. While the “From the river to the sea” slogan predates the current war in the Middle East by several decades, it has arguably taken on a new, genocidal meaning after 7 October. Last October, the Berlin state’s prosecutor’s office announced the phrase was subject to criminal penalties because it negates Israel’s existence.
“These statements do not originate from the festival and do not represent the festival’s stance”, the Berlin film festival said in a statement. “The posts were deleted immediately and an investigation was launched into how this incident could have occurred.”