ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - As the echo of the applause that filled Potsdamer Platz during the closing ceremony of the Berlin International Film Festival on Saturday fades to silence, a message of solidarity with Palestinians still reverberates loudly through the statements of winning directors.
This year’s edition of the prestigious Berlin International Film festival, Europe’s first major film festival of the year, better known as the Berlinale, came to an end on Saturday, with the various sought-after prizes being distributed among the winners of the festival’s many categories. When following the award ceremony Rudaw’s team on the ground spoke with some of the winners, a strong message of solidarity with Palestinians and condemnation of the violence in Gaza came through loud and clear.
The prize for best documentary this year was awarded to “No Other Land,” by a Palestinian-Israeli collective of four young activists. Basel Adra, one of the film’s directors, noted that while the award for best documentary is an important achievement, so is the audience award the film would be receiving the following day.
“All these years I’ve been filming my community being erased and demolished by Israeli occupation forces and their bulldozers and their building settlements… and I was always asking…is [are] people going to care about this, is somebody going to watch these videos,” said Adra, adding that when Yuval Abraham, an Israeli journalist, together with the other two directors joined him on this project, they all asked themselves the same questions. “Today at least we have an answer to this question; that people want to watch this movie,” he concluded.
Abraham, who also spoke to Rudaw said he felt encouraged by seeing people were moved by the documentary and that the audience was validating the “injustice that is happening on the ground” and the inequality existing between him and his co-director.
“I am an Israeli under civilian law but Basel is thirty minutes away from me under military law. He never votes, I have voting rights. This has to stop. How long is it going to go for? Really it has to stop, it's unjust and it’s wrong, and to see more people seeing that, not only understanding but feeling it after watching our film, for me is giving hope that people will change, because we need a political solution,” said Abraham.
However, it was not just Adra and Abraham, who are directly connected to Israel’s war on Gaza, who expressed solidarity with Palestinians at the Berlinale. Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russel, directors of “Direct Action,” winner of the best film award in the festival’s Encounters section, wore keffiyehs in a clear message of support for Palestinians. Russell told Rudaw the gesture was one of “solidarity with Palestinians and add our voices to the many voices calling for a ceasefire to end the genocide.”
“Direct Action” tells the story of a militant activist community in France which succeeded in preventing the expansion of an international airport in 2018 and elicited the emergence of a new ecological movement three years later, exploring the question of whether a radical protest movement can lead to progress in facing the climate change crisis.
Highlighting the connection between the resistance portrayed in their movie and the resistance of Palestinians, Russell noted that the choice to wear a keffiyeh “ seems especially obvious in that our subject is necessarily political and cinema is a political act.”
Similar views on the powerful social role of cinema were echoed by Emily Watson, English actress who won the Silver Bear for Best Supporting Performance for her role in “Small Things Like These.”
“Cinema, television, books it’s how we learn how to behave, how to be human,” said Watson, who also dwelled on the feeling of amazement that overcame her when in the room with “young, angry” filmmakers. “It sort of really feels like that was a room full of hunger and need, people wanting to tell stories because they absolutely have to to survive, and that feels like a very special thing to be part of.”
2024 Golden Bear Winner “Dahomey,” by French-Senegalese director Mati Diop, also shed light on the socio-political power of cinema highlighted by Russell and Watson.
“Dahomey” tells the story of a group of Beninese university students who debate over how to approach the return of 26 royal treasures of the Kingdom of Dahomey, in modern-day Benin, from Paris, where they were taken to by plundering French colonial troops in 1892.
The golden bear is the highest prize awarded at the Berlinale.
Colonialism is a central theme in the movie. “ It’s a very tricky situation because everything is made for us to believe that it’s past, it’s behind us, it doesn't exist anymore, but it’s not true. It’s absolutely part of our system, institutionally, politically, socially, it’s there everywhere and it takes a while to put the finger on it,” Diop told Rudaw.
The director compared this process of realization to a wall of “of silence, of denial, of taboo,” falling, stressing the timeliness of talking about subjects such as violence and abuse against women or the “atrocities going on in Palestine.”
“Lots of people are striking and speaking out against these horrors and I think that … more and more people stand against injustice, and speak out in many different ways,” said Diop, adding that her movie might be “a symptom of liberation,” and urging people “to use all the ways we have to resist against neo-fascist, to resist against extreme right ideas, to resist against the worst.”