On a snowy night in February, Tilda Swinton stepped onto the main stage of the Berlin International Film Festival to collect a career achievement award. Dressed in a sparkly high-collared gown, the British actress began by talking about the weather.
“I’m so happy it’s snowing today,” she said after picking up her trophy during the opening ceremony of the 2025 Berlinale, as the festival is known. “It used to snow every year here,” she said, remembering how, as a 25-year-old attending her first Berlinale, she would walk into the festival venue in snow-covered boots.
The actress then paid tribute to “the great independent state of cinema,” and took thinly veiled swipes at President Trump’s plans on immigration and the reconstruction of Gaza.
Cinema is “innately inclusive: immune to efforts of occupation, colonization, takeover, ownership or the development of riviera property.” she said. It is “a borderless realm and with no policy of exclusion, persecution or deportation.”
Swinton’s speech could easily have been delivered at Europe’s other two major film festivals, Cannes and Venice — except for the bit about the weather. The Cannes Film Festival is held on the French Riviera in May, while the Venice Film Festival takes place on Lido island (another seaside resort) in late August and early September. The sun shines on most days at those events, temperatures range from mild to warm, and actresses walk the red carpet in strapless gowns and sandals, not winter coats and snow boots.
From a calendar and climate standpoint, in other words, Berlin is disadvantaged. It takes place in the dead of winter, about a month before the Academy Awards — when the awards season race, which has become an important launchpad for movies, is nearly over. Perhaps as a result, film industry experts say, the festival has, in recent years, been somewhat overshadowed by its sister events.
A new director — the American-born Tricia Tuttle, who took the Berlinale helm in April 2024 — is trying to change things. She would like Berlin to be not just a place to see politically engaged art house titles, but also a showcase for big-budget movies with star casts. She is also concentrating on the festival’s other strong points: audience engagement, with 340,000 public admissions to festival movie theaters last year (according to official festival figures); and the European Film Market, the business arm of the festival, which draws film buyers and sellers from about 130 different countries each year.
In a video interview, Tuttle said the Berlinale was “very comfortable in its skin” about showcasing filmmakers who “shine a light on things they see in the world that are unjust or unfair, or that they’d like to change.”
“What I don’t love, and that I’d like to see changed” is the festival “always being categorized as only that,” she said, “because we are also about the pleasure and the fun and the transformative nature of sitting in an audience and laughing with other people.”
Credit: New York Times
