Bernd Buder is tired of talking about politics.
“Israel and Gaza, anti-Semitism, the far right, that’s all we ask for,” says the program director of the Jewish Film Festival Berlin-Brandenburg (JFBB). “I prefer to talk about cinema.”
But for Germany’s largest Jewish film festival, which begins Tuesday, June 18 and runs through June 23, politics is inevitable. Eight months after the start of the war in Gaza, triggered by the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, and barely a week after the European elections which saw a surge in support for the far right, the JFBB and its program are filtered. through the prism of daily headlines from Rafah, Brussels and Berlin.
“We only have one film in selection which was made after October 7. [Oz Zierlin’s Home Front]”, says Buder. “But of course we know that many of the films that we show, perhaps before the war started, will now be seen differently.”
The missing soldier
Courtesy of JFBB
He points the finger at Dani Rosenberg’s thriller The missing soldier, about an Israeli recruit serving in Gaza who goes on the run and returns home, only to realize that his family and the country thought he had been kidnapped by Hamas. Or Noam Kaplan’s sci-fi drama The future, which imagines a new algorithm intended to predict terrorist attacks. “People will watch these films differently than they would have before October 7.”
Developments in Germany mean that people might also perceive the JFBB differently. This year’s Berlin Film Festival was overshadowed by disruption and debate over Gaza, with the awards ceremony becoming heavily political as one winner after another used their festival platform to call out the Israeli government for its actions in the war. Israeli filmmaker Yuval Abraham, whose No other land won the award for best documentary, spoke about “apartheid” in his home country. Ben Russell, the American co-director of Direct actionwinner of best film in Berlin’s Encounters section, took the stage wearing a black and white Palestinian keffiyeh and used the word “genocide” to describe Israeli military action in the region.
Ben Russell (left) and Servan Decle (right) wear Palestinian scarves on stage during the closing gala at the Berlinale Palast, alongside Jay Jordan (2nd left) and Guillaume Cailleau after winning the Encounters Award for Best Film For the movie Direct action.
Monika Skolimowska/alliance photo via Getty Images
“I think the Berlinale was not well prepared for this debate and it led to unfortunate results,” says Buder. “I think we are better prepared because we are used to addressing these issues in a more complex way. My position has always been that films are not there to provide answers, nor are they political…
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