The Berlinale, aka the Berlin International Film Festival, was in the news this week. Not because of the movies on the lineup. But because this year’s jury president, the film director Wim Wenders (“Wings of Dire,” “Buena Vista Social Club”), kicked things off by telling journalists that people who make films “have to stay out of politics.”

Echoing those sentiments, at least to a degree, were some of the actors also in attendance, including Neil Patrick Harris and Michelle Yeoh. This only intensified the perception that the fest’s participants were told to avoid anything but promotional-focused soundbites.

But what isn’t political in filmmaking — from who gets funding to whose stories get told? All of that is influenced by larger forces shaping the world. You can’t fault audiences for wondering why celebrities were playing coy. Call it the politics of cowardice. Or expediency.

Things got heated enough that Berlinale head Tricia Tuttle issued a statement. Here’s an excerpt:

People have called for free speech at the Berlinale. Free speech is happening at the Berlinale. But increasingly, filmmakers are expected to answer any question put to them. They are criticised if they do not answer. They are criticised if they answer and we do not like what they say. They are criticised if they cannot compress complex thoughts into a brief sound bite when a microphone is placed in front of them when they thought they were speaking about something else.

I’m not mad. Don’t write in the newspaper that I got mad.

The subtext

A group of experts from the U.N. have urged the German government to “stop criminalising, punishing, and suppressing legitimate Palestinian solidarity activism.”

Also: The Berlinale is funded by the German government.

The subtext being: Is the German government exerting pressure on the fest and its celebrity attendees to avoid this topic specifically — or any other topic that isn’t sufficiently anodyne?

Talking to The Hollywood Reporter this week, Tuttle described the questions posed by journalists as an organized gotcha campaign. Perhaps she would prefer fawning deference and that expectation doesn’t come out of nowhere; a lot of celebrity media coverage takes this path.

But more importantly, her allegation of an organized campaign by journalists effectively seeds the idea that a conspiracy is afoot (to do what, exactly??) while deftly not addressing the content of Wenders’ words, or why a parade of celebrity attendees were echoing his sentiments.

One outlier was author Arundhati Roy, who was scheduled to attend the fest for a screening of her 1989 film "In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones," but she pulled out, aghast at what Wenders and others were saying: “To hear the jury say that art should not be political is jaw-dropping".

And more than 80 current and former celebrity attendees signed an open letter noting that it’s impossible to separate filmmaking from politics.

Speaking to Screen Daily, Tuttle stressed:

We reject that our programmers have intimidated filmmakers, that we’ve silenced filmmakers.

Later in the interview, she also said this:

We are in the process of reaching out to some of the people we know who have signed the letter, to make sure they really understand what they’ve signed.

One might argue that is exactly how intimidation works.

What do the celebrity attendees at the Berlinale actually believe?

Let’s pause to acknowledge that we don’t know where any of these actors, directors or screenwriters stand on certain issues. There’s no reason to assume they would speak truth to power.

Back at the fest, questions continued apace. Ethan Hawke tends to give thoughtful interviews, and when asked during his press conference about the topic du jour, his response boiled down to two points.

One:

Anything that fights fascism, I’m all for it.

Not much substance, but simple and direct.

Two:

The last place you probably want to look for advice in your spiritual counsel is a bunch of jet-lagged drunk artists talking about their film.

I mean, yes.

But since when do drunk artists not have plenty to say?!

They absolutely are capable of saying something like:

“I’m concerned about [issue] and filmmakers who want to make movies about [issue] need their work funded and picked up by film distributors. If this industry is going to exist in any relevant form, the powerbrokers need to support movies that have something meaningful to say about our world.”

Reducing celebrities to mere “jet-lagged drunk artists” is a convenient way to pretend they don’t have an enormous platform every time someone puts a microphone in their face.

Celebrities take up a lot of space in our culture and this is a major international film festival that gets a lot of press coverage.

The consequences

It’s true that saying something meaningful about any number of real-world issues — there are so many to choose from — might come at a cost. But you can’t participate in a profession that prioritizes your voice, and then be appalled when people expect you to use it.

On Twitter, Mark Ruffalo made this observation:

To suddenly have politics be a no go discussion at the Berlinale is a little weird. Especially at the very moment when everyone WANTS them to say something to remind the world they actually are artists.

Also in Berlin this week, but unrelated to the fest: A gala called Cinema for Peace.

Attendees included Hillary Clinton, Becca Good (the widow of Renee Good, who was shot dead in her car by ICE in January) and … Kevin Spacey? What are we doing here?

The Most Valuable Film of the Year award was given to “The Voice of Hind Rajab.” The documentary uses audio of a 6-year-old girl who called volunteer rescuers and pleaded for help after becoming trapped in a car in Gaza, where her family members had been killed.

“The Voice of Hind Rajab” is Oscar nominated this year and the director is Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania, who used her acceptance speech to make her stance clear:

The Israeli army killed Hind Rajab — [and] killed her family; killed the two paramedics who came to save her — with the complicity of the world’s most powerful governments and institutions. I refuse to let their deaths become a backdrop for a polite speech about peace. Not while the structures that enabled them remain untouched. So tonight, I will not take this award home. I leave it here as a reminder.

Also:

Cinema is not image-laundering.

Unfortunately, it can be. And very often is. But her point stands; it shouldn’t be image-laundering.

All of that is political.

The BAFTA’s

Let’s turn our attention to the BAFTA’s (the British Academy Film Awards) which are Sunday.

According to Deadline, the BBC will be closely monitoring for:

… politically-charged speeches after the UK broadcaster sparked a national scandal last year by streaming a Glastonbury Festival act chanting “death to the IDF.”

A second source close to the BBC’s thinking added that there will be “nervousness” about anti-Donald Trump rhetoric from winners …

A close eye may also be kept on issues relating to Jeffrey Epstein and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, who was arrested on Thursday on suspicion of misconduct in public office.

The piece notes:

BAFTA does not forbid political messaging, but does ask winners to keep their remarks brief.

If “political messaging” is allowed, why is this a story at all? Perhaps because certain political messaging is, in fact, not allowed.

Stephen Colbert isn’t interested in laundering anything

Ironically, back in the U.S., it’s late-night TV talk show host Stephen Colbert who has more fortitude than most celebrities right now.

His CBS show is ending in May — a budgetary decision according to Paramount; speculation about the company’s real motivations suggests otherwise. But perhaps he feels he has nothing to lose, so damn the torpedoes.

James Talarico is running for U.S. Senate in Texas and Colbert invited him to be a guest on the show. That interview did not air during his CBS broadcast. Here’s why:

We were told in no uncertain terms by our network's lawyers, who called us directly, that we could not have him on the broadcast. Then I was told in some uncertain terms that not only could I not have him on, I could not mention me not having him on. And because my network clearly doesn't want us to talk about this, let's talk about this.

According to Colbert, the reason given was this: The FCC’s “equal time” rule says that if one candidate in a race is invited on a show, all the other candidates must also get the same opportunity.

There is, however, a carve out for news interviews and talk show interviews. Current FCC Chairman Brendan Carr issued a letter last month saying he was considering eliminating those exceptions. Not that the rule had been changed. But that he was considering a change to it.

CBS, under parent company Paramount Global, decided to comply in advance.

The FCC can only set content guidelines for broadcast TV and radio; cable, streaming and the internet are outside its purview. So Colbert did the interview with Talarico and put it on his YouTube channel instead.

The irony is that because of the resulting news coverage, more people probably saw the interview than if CBS had allowed it to air. The video was posted Monday night and had more than 8 million views as of Friday morning. Talk about your Streisand effect.

On Wednesday, Carr had this to say:

Congress passed the equal time provision for a very specific reason. They did not want the media leads in Hollywood and in New York to put their thumbs on the scale and pick their winners and losers in primaries and general elections.

Broadcast TV and radio do still draw an audience. But in 2026, those numbers are nothing compared to streaming (which includes any number of shows posted to YouTube) and social media platforms like TikTok.

Broadcast media simply does not have the power — the monopoly — it once did, so Carr sounds ridiculous, as if he were tasked with regulating a speed limit for horse-and-buggies on a road long overtaken by cars.

In the 21st Century, sowing disinformation is a far more pressing concern when it comes to media exposure (hello, Cambridge Analytics) and the entities that exert the biggest influence exist outside the broadcast realm.

But wait, the Colbert situation got even messier.

On Tuesday’s show, the day after the Talarico interview, Colbert discussed the situation further:

Without ever talking to me, this corporation (Paramount) put out this press release … Clearly this statement was written by, and I’m guessing for, lawyers.

Now, I’m not a lawyer and I don’t want to tell them how to do their jobs. But since they seem intent on telling me how to do mine, here we go.

The whole thing is worth watching.

(NBC is probably thrilled to know Jimmy Fallon is too spineless to ever similarly ruffle corporate feathers. “Saturday Night Live” executive producer Lorne Michaels was the puppet master who installed Fallon at “The Tonight Show” and he has a lot to answer for.)

Let’s close this out with the words of Angela Bassett, who received an award this week at the American Black Film Festival Miami. In her speech, she stepped back to assess our moment:

Targets are being put on our backs as people by those at the highest heights of power in the world.

And the only way to combat such vitriol and racism and misinformation about who we are is to keep telling our own stories, by showing the power of our individual and collective journeys. And to not just show the world the kings and queens that we have always been, but to also show them that we do belong, we do matter, and we are not going anywhere because we are home.

Taking everything into account, I don’t know how anyone in Hollywood can look in the mirror and tell themselves that power and politics won’t affect their livelihoods.

To pretend otherwise is to live in a fiction of one’s own making.