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Berlin is a difficult place to hold a major international film festival. Perhaps, as the events of the last two weeks have shown, an impossible one. The main cause of this difficulty is that Berlin, unlike all of its major competitors, is a national capital. Cannes, Venice, Toronto and Sundance are all hosted in locations far removed from political centres of gravity. In Berlin, world events are for ever on the cinema doorstep and keep on spilling inside.
The event has long embraced its geographic fate: unlike Cannes and Venice, it is not simply an industry-facing launching pad for new films but also a public-facing festival selling tickets to new films to ordinary Berliners, and the world’s largest of its kind. But that openness also has downsides: the corridors of the Berlinale Palast are teeming with locally based film critics who are quick to perceive a drop in quality on screen or glamour on the red carpet as a reflection of their own diminished standing. The press conferences are rammed with political journalists who struggle with film-makers that find it tough to give unequivocal answers compared with lawmakers in the Bundestag down the road. (The video journalist who pressed jury president Wim Wenders on the festival’s stance on Gaza usually grills spokespeople at government press conferences.) And the closing gala is attended by politicians who constantly feel they must position themselves for or against whatever is happening on the stage. To make all this worse, the Berlinale takes place in what are usually the last weeks of the city’s interminably grey winter, when everyone is in a bad mood and impatient for the first blossoms of the spring.
It is important to understand this context to get a sense of the challenge that Tricia Tuttle took on when shewas appointed as the festival’s director in 2024. Two years later, a week after another politically charged edition of the Berlinale, Tuttle faces the axe, with Germany’s culture commissioner Wolfram Weimer calling an extraordinary meeting of the organising body’s board to discuss her fate. Weimer’s office told the press that Tuttle lost his support after she allowed herself to be photographed standing next to some film-makers wearing keffiyehs and brandishing Palestinian flags – something that is not in contravention of any German laws and hadn’t registered as a scandal in the national press until Wednesday. But so hardened are the lines between the historically rooted pro-Israel consensus within Germany’s main parties and pro-Palestine voices within its ethnically diverse arts scene that it sufficed as a pretext. A pronouncement on Tuttle’s future was postponed on Thursday, but it is hard to imagine that she will stay or, in fact, that she will want to after such a public dressing-down.
What’s important to note is that the criticisms of the Berlinale’s political or artistic content are not new, and Tuttle cannot be fairly accused of failing to address them. Previously the director of the London film festival, Tuttle took over from Carlo Chatrian and Mariette Rissenbeek, who had been criticised for being too cinephile and anti-popular in their programming, and too hands-off in handling political controversies. They were preceded by Dieter Kosslick, whose 18-year tenure was criticised for being too mainstream and not cinephile enough, and too enthusiastic in embracing Berlin’s status as the most “political” of the big three European film festivals.
Photograph: Ralf Hirschberger/AFP/Getty Images
That’s a confusing mandate, but Tuttle grabbed it with both hands. One noticeable change was that, unlike her predecessors, she made a point of sitting in on the jury press conference and attending photocalls. The photo that appears to have offended Weimer, showing Tuttle with the crew of Syrian-Palestinian film Chronicles from the Siege, was taken in this context, a week before its director, Abdallah al-Khatib, criticised Germany for being “partners in the genocide in Gaza by Israel” at the closing gala. When Wenders was attacked for insisting that film could not be political in a straightforward way, Tuttle vigorously rallied behind him. If the organisers of the festival wanted accountability, she delivered it.
It’s true that as a commercial launching pad for arthouse-to-mainstream crossover hits, Berlin has been slipping further behind Cannes and Venice rather than catching up. This year there was a noted absence of major stars on the red carpet, and a rise in big-name films that had already received their world premieres elsewhere being drafted in. But this isn’t entirely Berlin’s fault – last year the festival launched what was arguably one of the best films of 2025, Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon, but which has been sidelined in the current awards race. Moreover, under Chatrian/Rissenbeek, the Berlinale gave worldwide attention to the Oscar-winning No Other Land, one of the most important documentaries in recent years.
If Tuttle is indeed ousted in the coming days, who would want to pick up what looks ever more like a poisoned chalice? Which film-maker of international repute wouldn’t think twice before an accepting an invitation? Planungssicherheit, or planning reliability, is what German politicians insist their country’s industry needs in the face of volatile political developments in the US, China and Brexit-era UK. But it doesn’t seem to be something those same politicians are willing to grant to creatives. (The key artistic leaders behind Cannes and Venice, it’s worth noting, have been in charge of their affairs for 19 and 14 years respectively).
The Tuttle fiasco has ominous echoes of the Documenta art festival in Kassel – another major creative event that was meant to open up Germany to the world and the world to Germany. Once authorities realised that there are corners of the world that are not on the same page as Germany, for example when it comes to Gaza, they rush to stamp the whole thing down. Perhaps hosting a major festival that tolerates the world’s contradictions is too much to ask of Germany’s government at this stage. It may be wiser to retreat to its comfort zone for a decade or two and host a festival of nonpolitical film in a more peripheral city, such as Bonn. I’m sure other festivals waiting in line, Locarno in Switzerland and San Sebastián in Spain for instance, would be pleased to hear it.
