If the Berlin Film Festival fires its director, there may be no way back | film

forErlen is a difficult place to hold a major international film festival. It may be impossible, as the events of the past two weeks have shown. The main reason for this difficulty is that Berlin, unlike all its major competitors, is a national capital. Cannes, Venice, Toronto and Sundance are all hosted in locations far from the centers of political gravity. In Berlin, world events always remain at the cinema’s doorstep and continue to flow inward.

The event has long embraced its geographical destiny: unlike Cannes and Venice, it is not just an industry-facing launching pad for new films, but also an audience-facing festival selling tickets to new films to ordinary Berliners, the largest of its kind in the world. But this openness also has its downsides: the corridors of the Berlinale are crowded with local film critics who are quick to perceive a decline in quality on screen or glamor on the red carpet as a reflection of their declining status. Press conferences are filled with political journalists and filmmakers who have a harder time giving unambiguous answers than future lawmakers in the Bundestag. (The video journalist who pressed jury president Wim Wenders about the festival’s position on Gaza usually questions spokespersons at government press conferences.) The closing ceremony is attended by politicians who constantly feel that they have to take a position for or against everything that happens on stage. To make all this worse, the Berlinale takes place in the last weeks of the city’s endless gray winter, when everyone is in a bad mood and impatient to welcome the first spring flowers.

It is important to understand this context to recognize the challenge Tricia Tuttle faced when she was appointed director of the festival in 2024. Two years later, a week after another politically charged edition of the Berlinale, Tuttle faces the axe, as German Cultural Commissioner Wolfram Weimer calls an extraordinary meeting of the organizing body’s governing body to discuss her fate. The Weimar press office said Tuttle lost its support after she allowed photographs to be taken of herself standing next to some filmmakers wearing keffiyehs and waving Palestinian flags — something that does not contravene any German laws and had not registered as a scandal in the national press until Wednesday. But the lines between the historically rooted pro-Israel consensus within Germany’s main parties, and the pro-Palestine voices within the ethnically diverse arts scene, were enough of an excuse. An announcement about Tuttle’s future was postponed Thursday, but it’s hard to imagine she’ll stay, or, indeed, that she’ll want to after such a public rebuke.

What is important to note is that criticisms of the political or artistic content of the Berlinale are not new, and Tuttle cannot be accused of failing to address them. Tuttle was a former director of the London Film Festival, taking over from Carlo Chatrian and Mariette Riesenbeck, who had been criticized for being too cinephile, anti-popular in their programmes, and hands-off in dealing with political controversies. They were preceded by Dieter Kosslick, whose 18-year tenure was criticized for being too mainstream, not enough cinephile, and for being too eager to embrace Berlin’s status as the most “political” of the big three European film festivals.

That’s a confusing mandate, but Tuttle grabbed it with both hands. One notable change was that, unlike her predecessors, she made a point of sitting in on the jury press conference and attending photo sessions. The photo that appears to have upset Weimer, which shows Tuttle with the crew of the Syrian-Palestinian film “Chronicles from the Siege,” was taken in this context, a week before the film’s director, Abdullah Al-Khatib, criticized Germany for being “accomplices in the genocide that Israel is committing in Gaza” at the closing ceremony. When Wenders was attacked for insisting that the film could not be directly political, Tuttle rallied forcefully behind him. If the festival organizers wanted accountability, they did so.

It’s true that Berlin, as a commercial launching pad for arthouse-to-mainstream crossover films, has been falling further behind Cannes and Venice rather than catching up. This year saw a notable absence of major stars on the red carpet, and a rise in the number of big-name films that have already received their world premieres elsewhere. But that’s not entirely Berlin’s fault – last year the festival released what was arguably one of the best films of 2025, Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon, but it has been sidelined in the current awards race. Moreover, during the Chatrian/Riesenbeck era, the Berlinale gave international attention to the Oscar-winning film No Other Earth, one of the most important documentaries of recent years.

If Tuttle is indeed ousted in the coming days, who will want to pick up what looks more like a poisoned chalice? Which director with an international reputation would not think twice before accepting an invitation? Planungssicherheit, Or the reliability of planning, is what German politicians insist their country’s industry needs in the face of volatile political developments in the United States, China and the United Kingdom in the period of Brexit. But that doesn’t seem to be something those same politicians are willing to give creative people. (It is worth noting that the main artistic leaders behind the Cannes and Venice festivals have been in charge of their affairs for 19 and 14 years respectively.)

Tuttle’s failure carries ominous echoes of the Documenta art festival in Kassel – another major creative event that aimed to open Germany to the world and the world to Germany. Once the authorities realized that there were parts of the world that were not on the same page as Germany, for example when it came to Gaza, they rushed to quash the whole thing. Perhaps hosting a major festival that tolerates the world’s contradictions is too much to ask of the German government at this stage. It might be wise to step back into its comfort zone for a decade or two and host a non-political film festival in a more marginal city, such as Bonn. I’m sure other festivals waiting in line, like Locarno in Switzerland and San Sebastian in Spain, will be happy to hear that.