The 2024 Berlinale was the last edition of the festival that took place under the duo headship of artistic director Carlo Chatrian and managing director Mariëtte Rissenbeek. Stepping down at the end of a 5-year tenure, Chatrian, in particular, has been praised for revitalising, with his curatorial talent, one of the most important and much-loved international film festivals.
The official reason for Chatrian’s and Rissenbeek’s departure is the pressure put by the German Ministry of Culture to reinstate a solo director, a position that has now been taken by former head of the London Film Festival Tricia Tuttle. However, a letter signed by 200 filmmakers – including Martin Scorsese, Claire Denis, and Ryusuke Hamaguchi – suggests some questionable political machinations behind this move. Their letter accuses the Minister of Culture, Claudia Roth, of “harmful, unprofessional, and immoral behaviour” for forcing Chatrian to step down. The letter also hints at the minister’s intention to take the festival in a more populist direction.
This year’s edition of the Berlinale also saw protests and calls for a boycott in response to the silence on the part of most German cultural institutions over the 30,000+ people killed in Gaza. As a result, several filmmakers cancelled their participation, while 50 workers of the Berlinale signed an open letter asking the festival leadership to take a “stronger institutional stance” on what the letter calls “the current assault on Palestinian life.”
The other episode that caused considerable controversy was the invitation of five politicians from the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AFD) to the opening gala. These invitations were initially made according to the standard practice of quotas automatically allocated to members of the Bundestag, but they were eventually withdrawn due to the protests that followed reports of a secret meeting between AFD politicians and neo-Nazi activists, where an alleged master plan for the mass deportation of immigrants was discussed.
Carlo Chatrian and Mariëtte Rissenbeek, photo courtesy of Berlinale
The top awards of the main competition went to two of the best films seen this year in Berlin: Mati Diop’s Dahomey (Golden Bear) and Hong Sangsoo’s Yeohaengjaui pilyo “A Traveler’s Needs” (Silver Bear). Before saying something about these two films, it is worth mentioning the most touching moment of the evening, which took place when the prize for best documentary was announced. The award went to No Other Land, the film by a Palestinian-Israeli collective documenting the destruction of a village in the West Bank by the Israeli military forces. Receiving the award, two members of the collective, Palestinian filmmaker Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, asked the German politicians sitting in the audience to stop arming Israel. They also made a joint call to the international community to act more resolutely to put an end to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. They were followed by other award winners and two of the judges (Jasmine Trinca and Véréna Paravel), who called for an urgent ceasefire in Gaza.
The backlash in the German media and among German politicians, who called the comments made on stage “one-sided”, was predictable. Less predictable was the official press release of the festival that dismissed the statements made at the ceremony as “activist” and “inappropriate”. After the publication of the press release, Carlo Chatrian distanced himself from the official position of the festival, defending the freedom of speech exercised by the speakers at the award ceremony and denouncing the instrumentalisation of antisemitism that had characterised some of the criticism of the comments made on stage.
An intensely imaginative follow-up to her debut film, Atlantics, Diop’s Dahomey definitely deserved the victory of the Golden Bear. Following the recent return of 36 statues looted by French colonial troops back to Benin, this documentary starts on a rather sombre note. The camera follows with forensic curiosity the packing of the statues in a windowless museum basement in Paris before their final return home. The quiet tone of this beginning is countered by the excitement around the festivities for the arrival of the looted treasures in Benin. The joy of the people on the streets of the capital of Benin, Porto Novo, conveys an irrefutable sense of the magnitude of this restitution. At intervals throughout the film – and this is one of Diop’s strokes of genius – the ghostly voice of one of the statues reflects on the years of imprisonment, taking us through the tunnels of history and then accompanying us back into this much-longed-for return home in the present.
Mati Diop poses with her Golden Bear, photo courtesy of Berlinale.
In one of the most captivating sequences of the film, Diop stages a debate at a local university during which several students discuss the meaning of this restitution: for some of the students, the return of the looted statutes constitutes an example of the arrogant benevolence of the former coloniser (the returned statues being only a small fraction of the treasures still held in France); while for others, it represents the starting point for a more substantial homecoming. Similarly to the incomplete outcome of this debate, Dahomey tells an unfinished story, one through which the ghosts of the colonial past come back to haunt us in the present, posing pressing questions to the old Europe that still struggles to respond adequately to their demand for justice.
A Traveler’s Needs is the third film made by Korean director Hong Sangsoo in collaboration with Isabelle Huppert. Over the years, Hong Sangsoo has developed a reputation for making films centred around everyday conversations whose touching intimacy reminds us that cinema can be enthralling, moving and funny also when it plays on a minor key.
In A Traveler’s Needs, Huppert plays an eccentric French woman (Iris) who has mysteriously ended up in Seoul, where she tries to make ends meet by working as a French language tutor. With no previous experience or training, Iris has devised a peculiar teaching method that, in her opinion, will give her students a chance to experience what expressing something truly meaningful in another language can feel like. Her classes are more like conversations conducted almost entirely in English. During the first lesson, it is hard not to giggle at the contrast between the smiles and the courtesies of the Korean student and the glacial, unimpressed attitude of Iris-Huppert, who tries to get at something darker, and perhaps more truthful, hiding behind her student’s pleasantries. Once this goal has been achieved, Iris takes out one of her index cards and writes down a rather elegant sentence in French that describes the complex emotion that Iris has ‘freed’ in her student, instructing her to repeat the sentence several times and learn it by heart before the next lesson.
Hong Sangsoo poses with the Silver Bear; the photo is courtesy of Berlinale.
A Traveler’s Needs reminds us that there is an effortless (and not yet fully explored) comedic side to Huppert’s aloof screen persona. The film never turns this comedic potential into farce. Rather, it subtly deploys it as an ironic flipside to Huppert’s lack of concern with coming across as ‘nice’ and to the director’s apparent interest in exploring the hidden truths that may lie under this aspect of the actress’s persona.
Other favourites at this year’s Berlinale were Alonso Ruizpalacios’s electrifying homage to the lives of the people who prepare our food, La Cocina, the gentle tragicomedy made by Iranian directing duo Maryam Moqadam and Behtash Sanaeeha, My Favorite Cake (the two directors were banned from travelling to Berlin by the Iranian regime for showing an unveiled woman in their film), and Tunisian director Meryam Joobeur’s moving debut film Who Do I Belong To on the struggles of two parents who try to reconcile their love for their two sons with the news that they have joined ISIS.
Hidden in one of the less visible sections of the program (Forum) was Săptămâna Mare “Holy Week” (directed by Andrei Cohn), a poignant study of antisemitism in a Romanian village at the end of the 19th century. Shedding light on the ‘everyday-ness’ of antisemitic prejudice from the point of view of a Jewish family that lives in the village, Holy Week looks at the chilling links between such prejudice and the horrifying violence that the Holocaust will render catastrophically visible on an incommensurable scale decades later. At a time in which accusations of antisemitism are being increasingly weaponised to discredit dissenting Israeli and Jewish voices that dare be critical of the actions of the State of Israel, this terrific film provides a sobering reflection on the actual workings of antisemitism and on the banal evil that fuels it.
This edition of the Berlin Film Festival was certainly turbulent. This may only solidify the reputation of this festival as one of the most politicised events in the festival circuit. It ought not to overshadow, however, the great legacy that the work of Chatrian and Rissenbeek leaves behind.
Follow Us