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Their statements caused criticism: Bear winner Mati Diop (center) between Guillaume Cailloux (left) and Ben Russell
Photo: Monika Skolimowska / dpa
The crookedest picture of the evening was the back of Berlinale juror Véréna Paravel.
“Ceasefire now” was written on the scrap of fabric she had pinned to her top.
The mini-transparent hung there, on Paravel's back, in a very strange way - as if the Swiss film artist had thought she had to smuggle her statement past some censors onto the stage of the Berlinale Palace.
There was no censorship on Saturday evening at the awards ceremony for the 74th Berlinale.
Quite the opposite.
A loud majority of those honored called for a ceasefire in Gaza and expressed solidarity with Palestine.
The Israeli-Palestinian directing duo Yuval Abraham and Basel Adra, who won the award for best documentary, did.
The British-French directing duo Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell, who won the award for best film in the Encounters series, did.
And French-Senegalese director Mati Diop, who won the Golden Bear for best film in the competition, did.
Each time there was loud applause.
Supporters of the misguided “Strike Germany” initiative would be well advised to watch this award ceremony.
Their distorted image of a Germany in which pro-Palestinian voices are silenced with all their might and which therefore has to be boycotted can no longer be maintained.
Apparently every person was able to express their opinion on stage.
The double silence
At the same time, they should better not read any comments about this evening or follow the debates about it on social media - because what has been going on there since the gala is frighteningly close to being a distorted image.
The applause would have been inhumane, Cailleau and Russell would have been stripped of their prizes, and anti-Semitism imported by Islamists would have been on display here, it was said online.
Federal Minister of State for Culture Claudia Roth later identified “deep hatred of Israel” in the statements of the juries and prize winners.
But the evening and the outrage surrounding it don't quite go together.
In their one-sidedness, the commitments to the Palestinian cause were difficult to bear.
They should be criticized forcefully.
The more often a ceasefire was called for and solidarity with Palestine was expressed, the louder the silence about other acts of violence and their victims became.
This was particularly true for the Israeli victims of the Hamas massacres of October 7th and for the many Israeli hostages who are still in the control of the terrorist organization.
Only Berlinale managing director Mariette Rissenbeek remembered her in her speech.
But it also applied to the dead in the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine.
On the second anniversary of Russia's full-scale invasion, which fell on the day of the awards ceremony, this ignorance was also shocking.
One would have wished that such an imbalance could not arise at a tolerant, inclusive film festival, like the Berlinale wants to be.
But anyone who demands empathy, circumspection and differentiation from speakers should also practice this themselves.
To denigrate all of the evening's statements as hate speech is not the correction of one-sidedness, but rather its exact reflection.
When director Russell, wearing a kufiye, speaks succinctly about Israel's genocide against the Palestinians, then that deserves a sharp contradiction.
From the audience and also from the moderator.
But when the Israeli director Abraham explains that he and his Palestinian director colleague Adra have different rights, even though they live only a few minutes' drive from each other, and that he therefore finds the term "apartheid" apt (he explained this in more detail in this SPIEGEL interview ), then one should not immediately dismiss the voice of someone involved.
Bear winner Diop did not shout her solidarity address to Palestine into the hall, as the "Süddeutsche Zeitung" wrote (this can be clearly seen on YouTube).
And it wasn't the German cultural establishment that gave such loud applause for criticism of Israel on Saturday, as Israeli Ambassador Ron Prosor claimed.
The audience was very international due to the many film crews present - which caused a different, sometimes strange and critical reaction.
The war in Gaza is viewed in a much different way abroad than in Germany, and this bear award made that painfully clear.
For a long time, this debate was kept at bay by suspending awards such as the Literature Prize for the Palestinian author Adania Shibli as a precautionary measure.
The political orientation of the Berlinale Gala, on the other hand, was unplanned - but perhaps expected.
A courageous moderator, who had previously coordinated closely with the festival management, could have intervened and made the one-sidedness an issue.
More voices, not fewer
Nevertheless, an awards ceremony with spontaneous acceptance speeches carries a risk that culture urgently needs to continue to acknowledge.
Because if the way artists have to express themselves in their speeches is dictated beyond the framework that German laws already set, then censors will soon actually be standing at the stage entrances and want to take a look at the banner that you are looking at staples the back.
So if there is to be a review of the award ceremony, as Claudia Roth announced, then it should focus on how a dialogue can arise on stage that also enables contradiction.
How to include more voices – not fewer.