On the first Sunday of this year’s Berlin International Film Festival, Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah” (1985) — a nine-and-a-half-hour documentary about the Holocaust — screened to a nearly full house in the auditorium of the city’s Academy of Arts.
Tricia Tuttle, the festival’s new director, spoke before the film, along with a curator from Berlin’s Jewish Museum and Dominique Petithory-Lanzmann, the director’s widow. Tuttle called the screening a “triple remembrance”: This year is the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the 40th anniversary of “Shoah,” and the centenary birthday of Lanzmann himself, who died in 2018.
The mood was reverential. “Shoah” — which consists of interviews with Holocaust survivors, bystanders and perpetrators, as well as footage of the sites referenced by the speakers, such as the Auschwitz and Treblinka death camps — is widely considered one of the greatest documentaries of all time. Its monumental length is key to its power; it suspends viewers in the act of witnessing humanity’s capacity for evil and its astonishing resilience, which we see washed across the subjects’ faces as they tell their stories.
There’s no denying Lanzmann’s achievements or the significance of “Shoah,” yet the festival’s commemorative programming — which also includes the world premiere of “All I Had Was Nothingness,” a documentary by Guillaume Ribot that pays homage to “Shoah” — also plays out amid growing concerns that Germany’s culture of Holocaust remembrance is stifling the free speech of other artists.
Last year, the film festival, known here as the Berlinale, came under fire after filmmakers participating in the event (including the directors of “No Other Land,” a documentary currently nominated for an Oscar) were denounced by German officials and festival executives for making statements in solidarity with Palestinians.
In Germany, where a profound sense of guilt and responsibility over the horrors inflicted upon Jewish people by the Nazis continues to shape public policy, criticism of Israel (which politicians and some Jewish people contend is baked into pro-Palestinian sentiments) has become synonymous with antisemitic rhetoric. After the attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, and the subsequent Israel-Hamas war, some cultural institutions in Berlin — historically a haven for artistic freedom — have complained that they feel pressured to disengage with pro-Palestinian artists or risk losing financial support from the state.
If nothing else, Berlinale leaders seem to have taken this threat seriously. Attendees of this year’s festival, which runs through Feb. 23, have been warned against using potentially prosecutable speech, such as the slogan “from the river to the sea,” which German courts have deemed hateful for its anti-Israel implications, though others see it as a call for Palestinian freedom. In response, pro-Palestinian groups, including Film Workers for Palestine, have called for a boycott of the festival.
Some commentators, including film critics and politicians, have expressed fears that politics will eclipse the movies themselves. Would scrubbing the Berlinale of political commitments altogether allow it to avoid backlash from either side of the Israel/Palestinian divide? The assertion that film festivals should remain apolitical naïvely ignores the political underpinnings of their ecosystems, which depend on diverse commercial and diplomatic sponsors. Besides, politics — whether we like it or not — are expressed in what we choose to say or not say, and in the very act of curation itself.
Tilda Swinton, the recipient of this year’s honorary Golden Bear award and a known supporter of the Palestinian cause, chose to attend the festival despite the boycott calls. Her acceptance speech last Thursday, which condemned “internationally enabled mass murder,” was understood by many as alluding to the violence in Gaza, where more than 64,000 people have been killed by Israel’s bombing campaign, though it did not explicitly name it. The speech frustrated pro-Palestinian social media users who considered it a missed opportunity.
Peter Wollen’s “Friendship’s Death” (1987), the movie Swinton chose for a screening to celebrate her award, makes a stronger statement. In the film, Swinton plays an alien who undergoes a political awakening when she is captured by — and, eventually, roused to fight alongside — fictional Palestinian resistance forces.
As for the rest of the Berlinale’s selection, there’s a stark disparity between the kinds of Israeli and Palestinian films in play, with the latter represented solely by “Yalla Parkour,” an inspirational documentary, shot before the Oct. 7 attacks, about athletes from Gaza who run, climb and jump over urban obstacles. The films from Israel directly engage with the aftermath of Hamas’s assault. The documentary “A Letter to David” is about an actor who was taken hostage by Hamas. “Holding Liat,” by Brandon Kramer, explores the political differences between the family members of another Hamas hostage.
On the one hand, the Berlinale’s screening of “Shoah” seems to pile on to the privileging of the pro-Israel perspective in Germany. Lanzmann himself was a staunch supporter of Israel, and “Shoah” was originally commissioned by the Israeli foreign ministry (though it withdrew its support when Lanzmann’s vision for the project became more ambitious and expensive, pivoting away from the intended feature-length run time).
On the other hand, in my mind at least, the purpose of anniversary screenings is not merely to pay tribute to past works, but to reconsider and expand them — to turn them, like prisms under a light, and see how they reflect the seemingly distant circumstances of today.
Lanzmann worked on his masterpiece for over 11 years, shooting over 350 hours of footage aimed at preserving the Holocaust’s memory — memory as it lives and feels in the minds and bodies of those affected by it. That’s why there is no archival footage or voice-over narration that explains the historical back story, only testimonies shot in intimate close-ups.
The director — a kind of mad-genius figure who joined the French resistance against Nazi Germany as a teenager and appears in “Shoah” as a passionate, at times even aggressive, interlocutor — was disturbed by the culture of silence around the Holocaust in postwar Europe. “Shoah” may concern the horrors inflicted upon Jewish people, but what sets it apart from the Holocaust documentaries that came before it is the demands it places on our focus — its insistence that we listen and, at all costs, allow others to speak, because otherwise we deny the realities of their lives.
