Berlin fest boss on Censorship Claims, social media backlash

Tricia Tuttle has had a rough week.

The Berlin Film Festival director has spent the past seven days, since the start of the 76th Berlinale on Feb. 12, in permanent crisis mode, forced to respond to one social media uproar after another.

The rage cycle began on day one, at the first Berlinale press conference, after a comment by jury president Wim Wenders that filmmakers “have to stay out of politics” triggering an online backlash. That set the tone for press conference after press conference, with filmmakers being asked targeted political questions, often with little or no connection to the movies being discussed.

Things came to a head on Tuesday, when 81 former Berlinale alumni, including Tilda Swinton, Javier Bardem, Tatiana Maslany, and Adam McKay, signed an open letter calling out the Berlin International Film Festival for “censoring artists who oppose Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and the German state’s key role in enabling it.”

Berlin has been here before. In 2024, pro-Palestinian activists called out the festival for failing to take a public stance against Israeli military action in Gaza. They also accused the festival of censoring pro-Palestinian voices, similar allegations to those made in the most recent open letter.

Last year’s festival, the first under Tuttle’s leadership, was largely free of such controversies. But they have returned with a vengeance this year. Despite a broadly positive reception for the films on display — The Hollywood Reporter has given raves for competition titles A Prayer for the Dying and Queen at Sea — its controversy, not cinema, that has dominated the conversation.

In a conversation with The Hollywood Reporter, Tuttle responded to the allegations in the letter, dismissed claims of censorship, and expressed her worries that a “campaign of half-truths” is threatening the future of the festival.

I spoke with our chief reviewer yesterday and he said this was one of the strongest Berlins in years, in terms of the quality of the films in competition. But all the talk this week has been about the “political controversies” involving statements by Wim Wenders and others at the Berlin press conferences.

Honestly I want to cry, because we went into this knowing how special all these films were, and we just haven’t been able to talk about that. This whole thing has taken a life of its own. The stress Wim Wenders and the jury have been under is so sad to me, because these films are really, really, strong, and people should be talking about them. Independent cinema needs us to elevate these films into some kind of consciousness for the market, so that distributors take some risks and release the films. It’s so very sad.

Because whatever we say about the controversy and the politics surrounding the festival, what we’re really trying to do, is to cut-through, to celebrate strong, bold cinema that risk-taking distributors can get behind and take out to audiences so that these films can have a life.

Did you expect the controversy?

I didn’t expect what happened in the way that it happened. Of course, I know that there’s a real tension, a campaign of people who really want the whole world to speak out for Palestinians continuing to be the victims of violence and intimidation, and that is a real urgency amongst many people. Then there are other people who want more complexity to the conversation.

There isn’t a lot of space in a film festival to have a complex discussion about what is probably the most urgent political issue of our time. There are other really urgent political issues, but this is such an urgent political issue, and it’s so polarized that it’s very difficult to have that conversation at a film festival.

We expected that discussion to be part of the festival, but there has also been, for two years, a campaign that takes truths, or half-truths, about the Berlinale and weaponizes these half-truths to try to make a point and provoke conversation and statements. We’ve seen that before at the festival.

[But] I really thought last year we affirmed our position, that we want to create a platform at the Berlinale for free speech, that we want to defend people’s right to speak. We didn’t necessarily want the festival to always be the one talking, but we were trying, in a very noisy world, to make sure we have space, first of all, for the films and the filmmakers, but second of all for perspectives that come out of the films.

I really thought we’d done that last year. I thought we’d proved that we’re not silencing people, that we value free speech, that the Berlinale is still the Berlinale that people know and love and need it to be in terms of dialogue and discourse.

So what surprised me, is that the campaign re-emerged this year in the form of journalists asking questions and then waiting until they got an answer that could be sound-bited and then turned into some sort of viral moment for this campaign. The fact that it’s so organized really caught me off guard.

How do you respond to the open letter accusing the Berlinale of censorship?

Again, I really understand the sort of pain and anger and urgency behind this letter from the signatories. I really, really get that. But what I would say absolutely is that it’s not true, and I really wish, especially the people who know us, that they would come to us first to talk about this. It’s not true that we are silencing filmmakers. It’s not true that our programmers are intimidating filmmakers. In fact, the opposite.

Anytime someone wants to talk to us about where we stand, because there’s been a lot of misinformation for a long time, we’re there and we talk to them and we have a conversation about this. So it’s really hard to shake this once it’s out in the world, especially when it’s inflamed and antagonized. But it’s just not true. It’s not true what’s said in the claims.

We are reaching out to the people we know there to make sure that they understood what they signed, and I would say other people should reach out to them too, to make sure that they understand and that they have evidence. Because I don’t know who made these claims. They’re anonymous. There is no evidence. So how do we even combat that? I don’t know who made these accusations.

Have you had any response from some of the signatories?

Not yet, not yet in a way we can talk about. It’s up to them to respond.

Have you had any contact with the group behind the open letter?

I don’t know who they are. They publish online, I don’t know who they are. So, no, no direct contact.

What consequences do you see if this sort of political debate, held mainly via social media, becomes the norm for discussion around the festival?

It’s clearly incredibly damaging, not just for the festival, but for all of culture, that people are forced to speak, and if they don’t speak, then that is an affront to people. If they do speak and don’t say what the questioner wants to hear, that is an affront. And if they say the wrong thing, then that’s a massive problem.

If that continues to happen, and we’ve been seeing this growing for a long time, studios and big companies will want to further manage the access that press get to talent. Because these viral moments can be really damaging for the films, if it means that all we’re writing about is the controversy, not the films. So for the festival, it’s existential. For the film industry, it’s also really problematic. I wonder if we going to see the same thing happening at every other festival in the world now?

One critique is that the Berlinale has taken political stances in the past, before your tenure — opposing the Russian invasion of Ukraine, supporting Iranian anti-government protestors, but hasn’t done so with regard to the situation in Gaza. How do you respond?

I would respond to it in two different ways. One is that, and I think I probably have spoken to you about this before, I realized through my time at London Film Festival that when we take a position on major geopolitical issues that are not related to the films in the festival, that becomes the story of the festival. I saw it in 2018, 2019, 2020. Every year you could see that that was happening. And I want the festival platform to be given to the 287 voices, the filmmakers, that are in the festival who are expressing all kinds of complex opinions about the world that we live in, some directly and some indirectly, some subtly, some not so subtly. I really want that space to be for them.

If I had been here in the time before, and I already had those lessons, I probably would have made the same decisions about how we reacted to those particular moments. That’s number one, and that’s genuine. I know that when you speak on behalf of your filmmakers, you sometimes take away their voice.

The other one is that when it comes to this particular issue, and we’ve seen it happen everywhere in the whole world, that it is really polarizing. Every conversation you have, you need to hold the complexity of the situation. It’s really hard to hold that complexity in a way that feels like it brings everyone into the festival, rather than shutting some people out of the festival.

We’re not shying away from it. If you look back at what we said over the last couple of years, you’ll see we’ve expressed our horror at what’s happening to civilians in Gaza, and we’ve also expressed other sympathies and empathies with different people who are suffering violence around the world. It’s not been a singular campaign from the festival but it has been there in the conversations.

The Berlinale receives significant funding from the German government. Does that constrain what you can say or do?

It doesn’t. They have strategic oversight, in that I report to them about financial matters. We get 40 percent of our funding from public funding. We earn the rest. What we do, what we say, is entirely up to us. We don’t get missives. We don’t get directives at all.

Is there anything you would do differently going forward?

I mean, we’ll have to see. We’ll have to sit back and reflect on what we could do differently, rather than have hot takes right now, because everyone’s tired, it’s been emotional. But yeah, I think we will certainly have to look at what we do.

Has there been anything positive for you in the last few days?

Yeah, absolutely. One hundred percent. To see so many moments where films have been getting such strong reactions from audiences and from critics really pleases me. It takes a long time to see how the market is going to respond to these, and it’s delicate, but I’m hopeful that good distributors are seeing these films. It takes a long time nowadays to make deals, but over time we’ll see these films turning up in good territories with good distributors and being taken to audiences around the world. Because they deserve it.