Opening of the 74th Berlinale: Berlinale 2024: Who is entitled to party?

This year’s Berlinale is ordinary and special at the same time. It is the last festival directed by Mariëtte Rissenbeek and Carlo Chatrian. Starting next year, the American Tricia Tuttle will direct the film festival. In this edition, which takes place from February 15th to 25th, not only was the number of films reduced due to austerity measures (from 287 to 204), but the sections “Perspective German Cinema” and “Berlinale Series” were completely deleted.

This time 20 films from 30 countries are competing for the Golden Bear. In addition to the awarding of the Honorary Golden Bear to Martin Scorsese, Andreas Dresen’s “In Love, Your Hilde” about the resistance fighter Hilde Coppi in the competition and Josef Hader’s tragicomedy “Andrea Gets a Divorce” in the Panorama are some of the highlights of this edition. As always, only a few female filmmakers are represented in the competition (six), as always the South Korean Hong Sangsoo is there with a film – this time with Isabelle Huppert in the lead role. And as always, there are Iranian directors who were prevented from traveling to Berlin by the authorities there. Behtash Sanaeeha and Maryam Moghaddam, who showed their work “Ballad of a White Cow” in the competition in 2021, can now not be present at the premiere of their new film “Keyke mahboobe man” (My Favorite Cake). So much for the usual or unpleasant facts.

But what particularly characterizes this year’s Berlinale is the outrage over AfD members on the guest list at the opening gala in the run-up to the festival. This year too, various politicians were invited to the opening ceremony, including some from the AfD. But this year there was public criticism of it for the first time, which led to the AfD representatives being disinvited from the Berlinale again.

This is the first time that the guest list and the festival’s invitation process have been under such scrutiny. The Berlinale initially tried to justify itself by saying that the festival is mainly financed by the federal government and the state of Berlin and that, due to the so-called invitation quotas, a number of politicians from the House of Representatives always receive invitations to the gala, especially from the Berlin Senate. According to the motto: We have always done it this way. People also talked about democracy. The current managing director of the Berlinale, Mariëtte Rissenbeek, spoke of a dilemma.

With regard to democracy and the dilemma, one asks oneself: Does democracy mean that politicians have a right to be invited to galas or celebrations just because they sit in the Bundestag or House of Representatives? And are the guest lists for special cultural events even put together democratically?

If you work in the local cultural sector for a while, you quickly notice how the guest lists at popular cultural events usually come together. Many factors such as relationships, lobbies, reach and prominence may play a role, but democracy certainly does not. You just have to look at how, over the decades, the PR people and other responsible employees have, with exemplary care, managed to ensure that some people always end up on guest lists – and others never. For example, that non-established artists or press representatives from smaller media outlets are not given any access.

If the organizers manage to filter out the media, for example, then it should also be possible to select the guests of the opening gala with the same dedication and precision so that certain politicians are not in the room. That doesn’t sound like such a dilemma. On another level, it has been common practice for a long time. Nobody talks about democracy or any quotas.

The question remains whether it is not clear to those – especially the festival organizers – who otherwise worry about why the enemies of democracy and the open society do not receive democratic gala invitations, that one of the AfD’s first topics If she came to power, the Berlinale would be abolished or transformed into the “German Homeland Film”.