Marshall Shaffer
“There’s a price for not acknowledging…”
Those are the final words uttered by the subject of Holding Liat, a documentary about the effort to free hostage Liat Beinin Atzili from Hamas following the October 7, 2023 attack. As a history teacher, Liat maintains an incredible circumspection about her experience as just one incident in a large history that extends before and beyond her. But the way her thoughts trail off without specifying what exactly is so costly to acknowledge is telling. Keeping with the film’s measured point of view, her piece of advice becomes a warning.
That same statement could also apply more broadly to the 2025 edition of the Berlinale, where Brandon Kramer’s aforementioned documentary had its world premiere. This year’s edition of the film festival arrived with many open questions. Some of these were inside baseball for cinephiles: how would new artistic director Tricia Tuttle remake the event? But most were larger: how would Berlin, both within the festival and also the city at large, respond to continued fallout over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that has flared in the Gaza Strip?
Among film workers of many stripes, calls to boycott and/or strike this year’s Berlinale traveled far and wide on social media. Under the banner of favoring “peaceful dialogue” rather than “free speech,” German politicians lashed out at the now-Oscar-nominated filmmakers behind No Other Land for using their acceptance speech to highlight the inequality they face based on ethnicity. (As a publicly funded entity, Berlinale has a different relation to its government than many festivals of a similar scale.) This was just the most high-profile incident of many where the festival was taking sides in whose pain and perspectives were valid enough to receive their attention.
I’ll admit: I felt a bit queasy and anguished about attending this year’s Berlinale given the repeated calls I saw from respected colleagues to give the festival the cold shoulder. And I wasn’t alone in that agony. Tilda Swinton, recipient of an Honorary Golden Bear for lifetime achievement, acknowledged the deliberation she made. “I was given, thanks to the festival, a platform which I decided in a personal moment was potentially more useful to all our causes than me not turning up,” she explained at a press conference. “I understand absolutely that boycotting can feel and very often is the most powerful thing we can do.”
In case it wasn’t clear by the existence of this piece, I ultimately decided to attend the festival in the spirit of trying to engage with the conversation rather than letting it take place on one-sided terms. I hoped to engage and maybe understand, even if I didn’t fully agree. Admittedly, there was not a ton of dialogue to be found. Blame it on the icy February weather that cut down on mobility, or maybe chalk it up to how much more taciturn the German people tend to be than the French at Cannes or the Italians in Venice.
But apart from one bullhorn and a banner agitating for Palestinians outside a hub for press and market screenings, there was hardly a peep of protest. It would appear most of the dissenting voices decamped to the alternative festival programmed by On Strike Berlin — far from the festival grounds. That ceded the opening night’s red carpet to be dominated by a show of solidarity for Israeli actor David Cunio, still held hostage by Hamas, with little but online consternation from those who wished to see a broader display of sympathy. Initial reports from a screening where director Jun Li made a statement in support of the Palestinian people indicated that festival staff were open to pursuing a conversation, but the legacy of last year’s controversies reared its head again with local police opening an investigation.
It seems like everything at the Berlinale was conspiring to elevate the message of the one film with ties to Palestine in their main competition, Yunan. If anyone had standing to address the issues swirling around, it would be the film’s director Ameer Fakher Eldin. (He’s of Syrian and Palestinian descent, was born in Ukraine, and now lives in Germany.) Watching his patient, tender film is like getting to observe a flower sprout and blossom.
Yunan is a film that takes missed connections and failed communication as its very subject. The beleaguered, fatigued writer Munir (Georges Khabbaz) sets off for an island retreat to recover from some recent health ailments. Things don’t exactly get off to a promising start when Valeska (Hanna Schygulla) cannot locate his reservation.
But Munir slowly begins to open up to the proprietor and her son Karl (Tom Wlaschiha) by drawing strength from a parable about a cursed shepherd passed down from his dementia-addled mother. Eldin’s film is remarkably alive to the power of storytelling and imagination to open up new portals to experiencing reality. His belief in the possibility of renewal is heartwarming because it’s given the chance to flourish organically.
The gentility of films like Holding Liat and Yunan stood in stark contrast to most of the other films I saw that dared to depict the contemporary world. Radu Jude’s Kontinental ‘25, a project the Romanian wunderkind turned around in the last four months, takes the temperature of a depleted continental Europe through a moral fable in the model of Roberto Rossellini’s Europe ‘51. His tortured protagonist Orsolya (Eszter Tompa) loses all her bearings following a tangential connection to the death by suicide of a homeless man she helped to evict.
These feelings of guilt, perhaps to the point of overcompensation, felt perfectly attuned to the mood of a German festival. I made a point to venture outside the festival grounds and acquaint myself with the more contemporary history of Berlin as a first-time visitor to the city. (No self-interested reason for an American to brush up on how fascists seize power, of course.)
The festival, like the city, has always been built on contradictions that require difficult deliberation and synthesizing. Recent revelations about the first Berlinale have uncovered that its first director Alfred Bauer played a significant role in propping up the Nazi film industry. That he would then turn around and say film should be “apolitical” — while helping shepherd a venture dedicated to fostering international cultural communication, no less — takes some mental gymnastics.
A tour guide who walked me around some key sites during the Third Reich and the Cold War highlighted something fascinating about one of their more recent sites of commemoration. Only a country that still felt it had to atone for one of history’s great atrocities would take their most valuable real estate when the Berlin Wall fell and use it to commemorate their greatest failing. They find pride in their shame. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is smack-dab in the center of the city where, my guide pointed out, you could ignore it but you couldn’t avoid it.
I felt that perspective mirrored in the kaleidoscopic visuals of Christine Haroutanian’s arresting feature debut After Dreaming. She wrings exquisite tension from the journey of an Armenian soldier Atom (Davit Beybutyan), a taciturn man tasked by a family to take their young daughter Claudette (Veronika Poghosyan) away from her father’s funeral. Their picaresque — and decidedly not picturesque — road trip follows an unconventional route by circumnavigating its destination rather than aiming for it directly.
While the elliptical structure of After Dreaming does lead it to spin its wheels from time to time, it’s always captivating to observe. In its shifting shallow focuses and faded edges, the film feels not so much shot by cinematographer Evgeny Rodin as it is dredged up from the recesses of memory. Haroutanian hypnotically captures a portrait of a people and nation in a state of purgatory, all amplified by a camera perspective that feels like that of a living ghost. Even as their express mission was to steer clear of tragedy, they never manage to escape it altogether. While the duo speaks little,
After Dreaming ends with one of the most eye-popping sequences of acrobatic camerawork this side of Roger Deakins or Emmanuel Lubezki. (Seriously, Haroutanian had better lock in Rodin’s continued collaboration in blood, or he’ll be shooting a crappy Disney movie within a decade.) A spectacle watched by characters on a television set gradually transitions into a dizzying battle sequence that plays out in an open field.
The camera seems to liberate itself from the rules of gravity altogether as it disorientingly collapses fantasy, reality, and nightmare into a phantasmagoric experience that defies description. But whatever valence once wishes to ascribe to the emphatic finale of After Dreaming, Haroutanian’s film clearly ends on a note that throws by the wayside all the repression and caution that preceded it. At least once within the bounds of the festival, it felt exhilarating to witness a film that could taste freedom even in the face of violence and loss.
