When the Berlin international film festival’s co-director Mariette Rissenbeek declared in an interview last week that the festival doesn’t strive to position itself politically, “especially in times when we don’t know where politics are heading”, I almost laughed at the sheer clumsiness. If only it wasn’t so sad. Rissenbeek was reacting to the disclosure that politicians from the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) had been invited to the festival’s opening gala on 15 February, a decision that provoked an open letter of protest from 200 film-makers and outrage on social media. The excuse that all the members of the Bundestag’s culture committee are automatically invited to this state-funded event is one thing. But to declare the whole festival is apolitical in order to justify the decision is another.
For weeks, hundreds of thousands of people have been taking to the streets of German cities protesting against the AfD, many of them demanding a a legal ban on the party, following recent revelations that AfD figures held talks with other rightwing extremists about systematically deporting millions of people from Germany. Anyone perceived as being not “German enough” would be a target for “remigration”, according to the reported discussions: immigrants with and without a residence status, those and their descendants with German citizenship, allies who take a pro-migration stand.
How could an international film festival taking place in the capital city only weeks after these deeply shocking plans surfaced be unaffected by this? And what is an apolitical cultural event anyway?
Ultimately, the film festival performed a U-turn, issuing a statement declaring that the AfD members had been disinvited after internal discussions (thanks those inside who pushed). Nevertheless, Rissenbeek’s original interview remains very disappointing. My strength of feeling about this is not just because this year I will be attending for the first time as a festival guest, presenting the film adaptation of my first novel, Elbow. The Berlinale, I’m now realising, has been a major influence on my approach to art and its political potential.
“I want to live, I want to dance, I want to fuck, and not only one guy,” says Sibel, the Turkish-German protagonist in Fatih Akin’s Head-On, before she cuts her arm as if to prove to us how real and fragile life is. When this film won the Golden Bear at the Berlin film festival in 2004, it not only changed the course of German cinema, but the lives of many girls trying to find their way out of the suffocating traditions of their parents’ generation. It changed the way we looked at ourselves. Not with pity, as earlier German dramas about migrant women did, but with an awareness of the strength and complexities inherent in us.
I remember how 20 years ago the evening news showed a whole crew of happy immigrant kids taking over the stage and celebrating the award for an achingly beautiful film about us, by us and for us. It was not an empowering moment solely because of the presence of people of a certain descent. A door was kicked open that night for a whole generation of young people from conservative Muslim or other non-Christian religious families, who had never had a space to be vocal about their sorrows without feeding into the racist German gaze. All of a sudden it seemed possible. We could be artists, we actually had something meaningful to say and we could do it on our own terms and still win.
Only recently did the impact of this film and its Golden Bear win become clear to me, when talking to female artists of my age and with a similar social background – that is, having grown up in a household of so-called “guestworkers” in Germany. While our parents and grandparents, who immigrated to Germany as underpaid labour, tend to have a strong aversion to Head-On for its harsh depiction of patriarchal violence and the provocative sex drive of protagonist Sibel, for us the film became something of an open wound. Especially after the tabloid press started an ugly campaign against the actor Sibel Kekilli, who ironically shares a name with the fictional character she plays.
Two days after the award show, the infamous mass-market Bild revealed Kekilli’s past as a porn actor under a pseudonym and made a sensation of her being disowned by her conservative family after the revelation. The direct parallels with the plot of Head-On added a bitter note to this success story, but politicised the film itself even more. The patriarchy that both Sibels were fighting against was transcultural: it extended across social classes, it was the oppressor at home and the oppressor at work trying to kick her from the limelight by humiliating her publicly over several weeks.
Of course, the Berlinale itself did not anticipate any of this – but this highly political moment in German film history is still deeply tied to the reputation and global pulling power of the event. A film festival is a platform, and it is always as political as the films it screens, as the audience it attracts – and, yes, as the people it invites.
You don’t invite fascists over and say, well, I don’t agree with you but I’m also apolitical, so let’s watch some arthouse films together. And if you do, either you are underestimating the power you have or you are fully aware of it. I’m not sure which option is more worrying.
Fatma Aydemir is a Guardian Europe columnist
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