Last Saturday, at the film’s gala premiere Queerpanorama, Projected in the Panorama section, he finished his speech reading a few words in English sent by one of his actors, the Iranian Erfran Shekarriz, who has declined to be in protest of the lukewarmness of the contest before the Israeli invasion of Gaza. At the end of those words, Shekarriz, through Li, used the expression “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” In it land In Berlin, a city-state in Germany, the first part of the phrase has already been considered by regional courts as a constitutive of crime, since it is understood that it denies the existence of the state of Israel.
That is why yesterday the Regional Criminal Office of Berlin opened an investigation ex officio, after disseminating the discourse in networks. In the speech, the filmmaker told how millions of Palestinians “are suffocating under the brutal colonial state of Israel settlement.” In a statement, the Regional Police explained: “These contents allegedly question the right to the existence of the state of Israel, which in Germany is typified as a crime, which is why investigation has been opened.”
The speech also accused the contest, together with the German government and its cultural institutions (Berlinale is a festival that depends on public institutions), to contribute to the apartheid, to the genocide and the brutal extermination of the Palestinian people. In networks you can see how part of the public applaud and part boo, and a spectator snapshots: “Is China Democratic?”
Jun Li, filmmaker with a world -centered film work queer, He asked the German audience to fight for freedom of expression: “Our film speaks of freedom, the right to express and liberation. We will not be free until we are all free, be queer or Palestine. ” The same spectator who shouts before, after speaking the filmmaker of the Palestinian genocide, which “is not genocide,” releases a sound: “And the Jews!” After him, more public repeats “and the Jews.”
embodies in Queerpanorama To one of the objects of desire of the protagonist, who creates different personalities to have relations with the men with whom he crosses in a decrepit honek Kong.
On Saturday, the speech was not censored, but yesterday Tuesday, the new director of the contest, the American Tricia Tuttle, declared: “The Berlinale deeply regrets the incident” and said that “we previously inform to all our guests in advance about What political statements were especially sensitive and which could be subject to sanctions. ” And the crime is not in the speech, which protects freedom of expression in Germany, but the expression “from the river to the sea.”
The Central Council of the Jews in Germany declared Tuesday night “horrified” by the facts and especially when verifying in the videos disseminated in networks that Limas de Hamás had been repeated and applauded in an official act of the Berlinale, in The Urania room. “The fact that Hamas’s slogans generate applause in cultural fields bewilder of the Berlinale before this edition on how to face the hate open to Israel that was already seen last year, and the anti -Semitism related to Israel, so that we hope that behavior is properly sanctioned. ”
Very measured programming
that tell the Israeli side of the conflict, after winning last year the documentary No Other Land The best documentary award (the film is now the favorite of Oscar in its category). Its directors, the Palestinian Basel Adra and the Israeli Jew Yuvak Abraham, protested on the situation that the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip live today. And the expansive wave reached the entire German political arch, to the point that the Minister of Culture, Claudia Roth, said days later: “The statements were alarmingly partial and were characterized by a deep hatred of Israel.”
The touch of attention is found on the screens: already on the red carpet of the inauguration there was a vigil to ask for the release of, an Israeli actor who was – and still is – one of the hostages kidnapped by Hamas on October 7, 2023 In the Kibutz Nir Oz. Cunio is the protagonist of the documentary , by Tom Shoval, which premiered last Friday in the Berlinale Special section. In the Forum section it has been shown Holding clay, by Brandon Kramer, who focuses on Liat Beinin’s family, kidnapped in his Kibutz. His father is an American citizen, and will fly, while filming Kramer, Washington to ask for help with Liaat’s sister and son. It has also been seen Bedrock, that visit the Poles who live today in places where the Holocaust was committed; and I only had nothingness – ‘Shoah’ by Lanzmann, in which the Frenchman Guillaume Ribot revisits the Lanzmann Documentary Documentary Submerged in the 220 hours originally shot. Lanzmann’s, has also been one of the main dishes of the contest, which in his session commemorated the forty years of its YL premiere in the Auschwitz extermination field to free it.
On the contrary, in the programming of the contest, only a documentary on Palestinian Athletes in Parkour in Gaza, could talk about the other face of the conflict, but was shot just before the Israeli invasion. And at the inauguration, Tilda Swinton, with the golden bear of honor in hand, condemned the “mass murder enabled internationally.” He spoke of occupation and colonization, and although he talked about facing the facts and calling things by name, he never pronounced the words Gaza, Palestine or Israel.
