The 75th Berlin International Film Festival, known to everyone as the Berlinale, opened in a cold, snow-covered city; political election posters line the streets ahead of parliamentary voting the day after the awards ceremony. The ongoing German campaign is just one of several non-cinematic issues likely to mark this edition. A year after last festival's uproar over statements by the festival's leadership and many artists on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, that conflict continues; the war in Ukraine is unresolved; Trump's election as U.S. president is already creating fresh international tensions.
To head off quarrels with her invited artists, new artistic director Tricia Tuttle has committed to protecting everyone's freedom of expression, while maintaining certain standards of decorum. Even so, the Berlinale—long known for its inclusiveness and openness—has adopted new rules against wearing symbols with political meaning: some have read this as a ban on the keffiyeh worn in support of the Palestinian cause. Fortunately, other forms of participant inclusion remain in place. In candid fashion, the festival acknowledged that premiering films means some are finished only days before projection, making accessible copies impossible to produce. Still, a number of fully accessible films are on the schedule, using the Greta app for audio description.
Last year's heated discussions of Israel and Palestine stemmed largely from the particular weight that Jewish-German relations carry in Germany. It makes sense, then, that the festival would celebrate Claude Lanzmann's acclaimed documentary Shoah with a newly restored print, forty years after its premiere. The screening occupies a single theater for an entire day, because the film runs nearly ten hours: it endures because the reconstruction of the Jewish genocide relied on interviews—privileging testimony over images.
The Forum section, in turn, presents a less well-known documentary restoration: Katrin Seybold's Das falsche Wort, which tells of the Nazi genocide of the Sinti. Moving to a different continent but the same era, Kaori Oda's Underground takes us into the depths beneath Okinawa (site of one of the Pacific's major World War II battles), but in the language of experimental cinema—inviting us to imagine a haunting visual and sonic journey through hidden, unexplored worlds. The narrative unfolds through oral history, yet with the beauty of real places discovered in real time: a historian descending underground occasionally pauses to tell the stories of those who sheltered in caves during wartime.
The festival's opening film, Tom Tykwer's Das Licht, also takes up a subject newly urgent: Syria's civil war and the refugee crisis that saw Germany at the forefront of welcoming them. A Syrian refugee now in Berlin—a psychologist back home, a cleaning woman here—begins working for a German family: two socially minded parents and seventeen-year-old fraternal twins. The household is dysfunctional, cracked, so self-absorbed and fractured that they didn't notice their previous housekeeper had died in their home until the next day. The contrast is clear: the open-minded yet deeply fragmented German family, set against a parallel Syrian family whose story gradually emerges.
The Syrian woman, aided by a machine that emits flickering lights, manages to help the members of the household she works for, hoping they will help her in turn. The explicit parallel between Syrian family tragedy and the bourgeois troubles (romantic, professional, adolescent) of Western families is reasonable enough, but somewhat schematic; each character's psychology is expressed through musical numbers not always woven smoothly into the plot. It's an ambitious, many-layered film that gives each character space to face their own crisis, yet it strikes less incisively at the comparison between the West's identity crises and the crises of countries it sometimes tries to help, sometimes continues to ignore.