The Palestine cloud hanging over Berlinale

At times, the Berlinale assumes the form of a tinderbox waiting to explode.

- Prathyush Parasuraman

At times, the Berlinale assumes the form of a tinderbox waiting to explode. Last year, when No Other Land, the documentary made by Palestinian activist Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham won the Panorama Audience Award for Best Documentary Film and the Berlinale Documentary Film Award, it flew in the face of a festival that refused to contend with the genocide in any true and thoughtful sense. When Germany's minister of state for culture insisted she only clapped for the Israeli and not the Palestinian filmmaker, the faultline was made evident of a culture that refuses to distinguish anti-Semitism from anti-Zionism.

This year, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), the largest Palestinian coalition leading the global Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, called for the boycott of the Berlinale for its "complicity in the German government's partnership in Israel's genocide in Gaza...fail(ing) to protect filmmakers standing in solidarity with Palestinians."

With the Berlinale (13-23 February) commemorating the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II this year, screening the 9-hour, 23-minute documentary epic, Shoah (1985), and a documentary made from its discarded footage, Je n'avais que le néant (All I had was Nothingness)—Shoah par Lanzmann, the presence of Palestine was scratched at the edges. When Masha Gessen, writing about the politics of memory in The New Yorker in 2023, wondered about "(t)he fight over one rightful claim to victimhood", Berlinale's curation answered with a clean knockout.