A week ago, the Berlin Film Festival was bracing for the worst.
Alongside possible pro-Palestinian protests of the sort that took place at Sundance last month, it looked like a much larger demonstration, by German film industry and local activists, might completely shut down the red carpet. There was growing anger over the Berlinale‘s decision to invite members of Germany’s far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) to tonight’s opening gala. More than 200 film professionals, most of them from within the German industry, issued an open letter calling the decision “incompatible” with the festival’s official commitment to being a place of “empathy, awareness, and understanding.”
The Berlinale, which is state-funded, regularly invites 100 members of the Berlin state parliament to attend opening night. The parliament picks the guests, making sure to include members from all elected parties. Since 2017, that’s included the AfD.
“They always get invited, and they stand by themselves in a little circle, with no one talking to them,”
said a state parliament representative, speaking anonymously because they were not authorized to talk on political matters.
But the AfD’s increasing radicalization — a recent investigation revealed AfD plans to carry out mass deportations of non-ethnic Germans if they came to power — and its rising support in the polls has many in the country questioning whether the party poses a fundamental threat to German democracy. For weeks, hundreds of thousands of Germans have been marching in anti-AfD demonstrations, and there are calls to have the party banned.
Last Thursday, the Berlinale performed an abrupt u-turn and dis-invited the five AfD members on its guest list. Berlinale directors Mariëtte Rissenbeek and Carlo Chatrian called the move “an unequivocal stand in favor of an open democracy.”
“With 1,000s of people out on the streets every weekend protesting the AfD, I think the Berlinale just read the room,” says Deborah Cole, a Berlin-based U.S. journalist with news agency AFP. “It would have been a terrible look on opening night with, the first Black jury president (Lupita Nyong’o) with stars from around the world, to have the attention, and the scandal, on these AfD politicians in the audience. Who of course would have loved the attention.”
The uninvited right-wingers are already mining political capital from the festival’s U-Turn. AfD politician Gunnar Lindemann took to X to compare the dis-invitation to the exclusion of the Jews from society under the Nazis.
“The comparison was very on brand but also so jaw-dropping that you think well protocol is one thing, but these people have business being [at the Berlinale],” says Cole.
It wasn’t always so. In 2019, the then Berlinale director, Dieter Kosslick, explicitly invited AfD members to the festival, urging them to see a documentary about the reality of life in the Warsaw ghetto.
“And he got a huge round of applause for that,” notes Cole. “But German politics has changed. This
quaint enlightenment idea, that it is possible to reach these people with cinema, at a time when one in five German voters say they would be willing to vote for the AfD, when you have three key elections coming up in eastern Germany, which is an AfD stronghold, feels to many like a luxury the Berlinale can no longer afford.”
Not everyone agrees. German Culture Minister Claudia Roth has supported the festival’s decision. Her spokesperson said recent revelations have made it very clear” how the AfD is thinking about disenfranchising and deporting a large part of the citizens in this country” making it “understandable that filmmakers from Germany, Europe and the world are committed to ensuring that racists and enemies of democracy should have no place at the Berlinale.”
But the spokeswoman for Berlin’s mayor, Kai Wegner, while “respecting the decisions of the Berlinale” said they will continue to “act according to the principle of equal treatment” and invite AfD members to their events, at the Berlinale or elsewhere.
The same goes for the popular NRW state reception, a must-attend for the German industry, held in Berlin on Feb. 18. “Nothing has changed,” regarding the AfD, an NRW spokeswoman told the German media following the Berlinale’s U-Turn, noting that the state government, like Germany’s federal government, is of the opinion that “all elected representatives” should be “treated equally.”
With its AfD about-face, Berlinale has probably avoided a PR disaster on opening night. But the debate over its decision is only just beginning.