The Berlinale film festival was always political. In fact, it emerged as a vehicle for Cold War soft power: ‘cultural freedom’ as a cudgel with which to beat the allegedly more restrictive and censorious groupthink of the Soviet Bloc.
It was started by two men. One, Oscar Martay, was the Film Officer for the US military occupation. The other was Alfred Bauer, a film historian and jurist who—surprise—had been a high-ranking Nazi official, helping make films while ratting out colleagues in the industry (Berlinale suspends award over first director’s Nazi past).
Bauer became the first director of the Berlinale and held that role until 1976, miraculously hiding in plain sight until his role in the Third Reich was belatedly ‘discovered’. It’s hard to imagine anything more political than a film festival started by a military bureaucrat and a Nazi propagandist.
This year’s fracas over whether the Berlinale might inherit some responsibility for the nefarious activities of its largest sponsor—the German government—is by no means the first political scandal to rock the festival. In 1970, the Berlinale fell apart amid the stench of hypocrisy and napalm fumes when the Jury tried to cancel a Brechtian docudrama about an atrocity committed by US soldiers in the Vietnam War from the program.
But first, cut to 2026, a week or so ago: a crowded hall, packed with film industry functionaries for the Berlinale’s opening press conference. After a series of softball questions from both the festival director Tricia Tuttle and the fawning press, podcaster and political journalist Tilo Jung punctured the cosy mood. First, he reminded the jury and its president, director Wim Wenders, that the Berlinale has previously intervened in wars and political repression—in Ukraine and Iran—by issuing statements and dedicating film programs to the victims of these conflicts, whereas no such solidarity has been extended to the people of Palestine. He then asked: ‘in light of the German government’s support of the genocide in Gaza and its role as the main funder of the Berlinale, do you, as a member of the jury, support this selective treatment of human rights?’
Two things happened in response. The first (with farcical overtones): the livestream of the conference was cut in the middle of Jung’s question. The festival later alleged an unspecified ‘technical incident’ was responsible (Inspector Clouseau tripping over a cable?) for this very unfortunate mishap that could otherwise be surmised as deliberate censorship.
The second: members of the jury completely ignored the context of Jung’s question and answered as if Jung had simply lumbered up to the microphone and screamed ‘Gaza!’
Zone of Interest producer Ewa Puszczyńska began to respond before Tuttle cut in to ask ‘does the Jury want to answer? We also wanted to talk about films…?’—effectively coaxing the jury to ignore Jung’s question. But Puszczyńska was determined to speak. She called Jung’s question ‘unfair’ and gestured vaguely at a banquet of violence around the world, including a cringe-inducing reference to a non-existent war in ‘Senegal’—the implication being that because the festival does not address every war in the world, the Jury is relieved of any responsibility to Gaza.
Wenders followed up, pontificating that filmmakers ‘have to stay out of politics’. Why? Because filmmakers are ‘the counterweight of politics, we are the opposite of politics. We have to do the work of people, not the work of politicians.’ This ungodly narrow mystification reduces politics only to the actions of politicians—it’s like saying only professional bakers can be said to bake—and deftly avoids the thrust of Jung’s question.
Both of these figures are presumably intelligent enough to understand the context of Jung’s question: whether complicity travels along the lines of financing for festivals, down from the regime that disperses the funds to those who accept those funds, sleep in complementary hotel beds, ride in complementary cars, eat and drink at the complementary trough—yet this was pointedly ignored. The same German purse that funds weapons for Israel, that provides moral and material support to the genocide, funds the Berlinale, and this raises the spectre that the Berlinale might have a special responsibility—even ahead of other instances of violence in the world—to talk about and to the victims of this genocide.
But no one on the jury gave an inch. The mood had soured, as those who luxuriate in inhabiting that thin sliver of the Venn diagram in which ‘rich, successful, and righteous’ overlap were suddenly asked about their own moral culpability—and had nothing of value to say.
Cut to Berlinale 1970. The colour correction shifts from the crisp, cold 4K press conference livestream to something fuzzier and oversaturated. Swap out the dapper Wenders with his wide-brimmed specs and pencil moustache for the coiffed, shiny head of George Stevens, who was jury president for a Berlinale that fell apart under the weight of its own contradictions.
This implosion began when director Michael Verhoeven submitted an anti-war film called o.k. which depicted the real-life ‘Incident on Hill 192’. The ‘Incident’ occurred in 1966 in American-occupied Vietnam, when a GI unit kidnapped, raped, tortured, and murdered Phan Thi Mao, a 22-year-old Vietnamese woman. That we know about the incident at all (unlike countless others) is due only to the actions of one soldier in the unit, Private Robert Storeby (known as Eriksson in the film), who tried to prevent the atrocity, and when this was not possible, doggedly agitated for some kind of justice despite the indifference of his superiors and persistent death threats from his comrades (Casualties of war: an atrocity in Vietnam).
o.k., by contemporary film norms, is quite bizarre. In a Brechtian turn away from realism, Verhoeven employed German actors to play the US soldiers in the unit that raped and murdered Mao, and he transplanted the forests of Vietnam onto the forests of Bavaria. So, while the actors speak in different shades of Bavarian dialect, in place of the jungle’s raucousness, the soundtrack is dominated by the unrelenting twittering of South German birdsong. Even more surprising to contemporary eyes is the casting of a white Bavarian actor in the role of Mao, something virtually unthinkable in an era where casting decisions are dutifully scrutinised for signs of appropriation or erasure.
While this manoeuvre risks eliding the racialised dimension of US domination in Southeast Asia, the Brechtian turn has some advantages: it removes the risk of Orientalist clichés and stereotypes that intercede in other cinematic reflections on the Vietnam War told from the perspective of its white perpetrators, such as Apocalypse Now. Also, by overlaying both the periphery on the centre, and US violence over Nazi violence, o.k. echoes Aimé Césaire’s insistence that the gruesome brutality of Nazism was nothing particularly new, but rather the violence of Empire now applied to the metropole itself.
At a screening, Stevens and another Jury member insisted that the film was ‘anti-American’ and should be withdrawn. Which is odd, because although the film dramatises and condenses the actual historical events, it remains relatively faithful to what is in the public record. In fact, the charge that the film is ‘anti-American’ pre-echoes contemporary handwringing that reporting on the killing of children by the IDF in Gaza is somehow antisemitic for reproducing the ‘blood libel’ myth (though the latter accusation is even more egregious for conflating Israel and Jewishness).
To bolster his argument to exclude the film, Stevens quoted the statutes of the Berlinale at the time, which stated that the films shown should encourage ‘understanding between nations’, a greasy principle which sought to exclude political speech that might upset the powerful, and which is weirdly parallel to Wenders’ insistence that politics has no place in film.
Bauer, the ex-Nazi head of the Berlinale, told Stevens it was impossible to cancel o.k., deferring to regulations that prohibit an ‘A Festival’ (meaning a top-tier festival) from removing a film once it has been accepted. Desperately trying to hold the festival together, he then went on to issue denials to the press that Stevens had ever even demanded the censorship of o.k. (O.K.: Michael Verhoeven; 20th Berlin International Film Festival).
What is striking about this incident is how retrograde Berlinale 2026 (and perhaps our era as a whole) is in comparison with Berlinale 1970, where, in solidarity with o.k. (and by extension with Mao and other victims of US aggression), scores of filmmakers removed their films from the festival. So intense was the criticism that by the third day of the festival, the Jury and Bauer felt the need to resign. In 2026, as far as I know, only Arundhuti Roy has had the moral clarity to withdraw.
Setting aside history’s eerie rhymes, o.k. itself offers a critical lens with which to view the Berlinale 2026. The film opens with a quote: ‘The bullet went through one of humanity’s ears and came out the other.’ It’s a line from the Karl Kraus play The Last Days of Mankind, and speaks to the First World War and how European media and culture could talk about its violence without really digesting the war’s abject horror in any meaningful way. Likewise, the Berlinale and its jury deal with war at the level of content—in the films they program—while refusing to trace their own lines of complicity, hoping to dodge the psychic grenade of horror and shame that this would unleash.
The soldier Eriksson/Storeby seems to be processing his own complicity as the film unfolds. Although at some junctures he tries to prevent the rape, at other moments he seems frozen, and in later interviews, he wonders if he could have done more to save Mao. We watch as the other soldiers try to physically force him to take part in the atrocity, so that their complicity will rub off on him, though they do not need to. Eriksson/Storeby, as a US soldier, as part of the US body politic, and as a witness, is already somehow complicit with the violence.
Yet this does not lead him to avoid or obfuscate his responsibility—unlike the Berlinale and its Jury. Eriksson/Storeby knows what he saw, and he won’t allow the truth to be erased or diminished just because the world is morally complex or because truth challenges the status quo and often presents itself as inconvenient.1
It is searingly obvious that the Berlinale is complicit with the activities of that state which funds it, even and especially when those activities constitute material and moral support for genocide. It is then crucial that cinema and culture do not turn away from the screen. The answer from the Jury to Jung’s impertinent question could simply have been, ‘yes, we are complicit’, let that grim awareness sink in, and take whatever steps are necessary.
1 Although Mao’s attackers were convicted, their sentences were either shortened or overturned and they each served at most a couple of years in military prison.