Everything's a Facade ! Einstürzende Berlinale !
Kunst + Krapital + Collapsing Kultur + A Machinehaus of Total Memory Recall
This image is NOT the Kontrollraum of the E-werk building where the new Deutsche Kinemathek is now located (since 2025) after moving from the Sony Center on Potsdamerstrasse ( that other disaster zone ). This is the control room of the Tschernobyl AtomKraftwerk after a “Super-Gau” ( meltdown in April of 1986 ), but it looks very similar to the one at the E-werk building, the location perhaps best known as the former Techno Club “cathedral” in the area of Mitte, which at one point was dubbed Berlin’s “Bermuda Triangle”.
There’s alot of eerie metaphors here for what has just occurred at the 76th Berlinale Film Festival this past week. There’s been a serious meltdown, and you cannot immediately see the fallout, and you can’t smell the toxicity, and you certainly can’t read about it properly in any of the main Deutsche Media channels !
And more importantly it’s NOT ONLY what this year’s film jury members Wim Wenders and film producer Ewa Puszczyńska said at the opening press conference where an independent journalist Tilo Jung ( from Jung und Naiv ) dared to ask the non-fluffy and necessary questions. Though their answers clearly slipped into a “Machinehaus Coma” … and by any sane account it was a spectacular FAIL !
The problem for the Berlinale and the German State and The Red Carpet Massage Industries is that people in Berlin ( and around the world ) who are still awake… know exactly what time it is ! The world’s on fire, and there’s no way of dodging the severity of the polycrisis ! This graffiti quickly appeared soon after, just across the street from the Babylon Kino. It reads: “ Wim, You Coward ! Film Is Political !”
There’s alot to analyze here ! But as a starting point we should probably share the words of Arundhati Roy, who needed only a few nanoseconds to call this shit out, and immediately declined to attend the festival ! Boycott !
“To hear them say that art should not be political is jaw-dropping,” she said. “It is a way of shutting down a conversation about a crime against humanity even as it unfolds before us in real time – when artists, writers and filmmakers should be doing everything in their power to stop it.” - A. Roy
One of the few German journalists - Hanno Hauenstein - based in Berlin who has not caved to the Big Business Media pressures has written one of the better responses to this catastrophic gutting of meaning in arts and culture spheres:
The irony here is embarrasingly obvious. The Berlinale has long cultivated its image of being Europe’s most political film festival. It has taken explicit positions in solidarity with Ukraine. It has spotlighted Iranian dissident filmmakers like Jafar Panahi and Mahnaz Mohammadi. Year after year, its programme is saturated with films about war, repression, exile, occupation, and resistance.
What made this moment even more strange was that Wenders’ remarks on stage directly contradicted his own words from two years ago, when he told German media: “The Berlinale has traditionally always been the most political of the major festivals; it isn’t staying out of it now, and it won’t in the future either.”
Everything’s a Facade ! Einstürzende Berlinale !
Apropos, there’s a section of retrospective films at this year’s Berlinale called Lost In the 90s. But the Super-Gau irony is that we were here in the 90s, and it feels like we were never more lost than in 2026 ! There’s some ‘cool’ curated films here. Ones we’d like to (re-) visit like Dusan Makavejev’s “ Gorilla’s Bathe At Noon “ ( 1991 ), Godard’s Allemagne Annee 90 Neuf Zero ( 1991 ), Vera Chytilova’s Panelstory, Aneb Jak Se Rodi Sidliste ( Panelstory, or How a Housing Development Is Born, 1979 )…
But we’re also considering “cancelling our subscription” to this Bullshit Facade!
NOT ONLY is this about the inabilities of a film festival to create political debate and dialogue about the horrors of a genocidal war in Palestine, but it IS certainly one of the most pressing and disturbing events in our world today. Tragicly there’s a whole bundle of emergencies in these polycrises times… Rising fascism + neoliberal vulturdom everywhere, environmental and planetary destruction accelerating, globalized oligarchic takeovers and endgames, gruesome-scale corruption and war profiteering, all leaking out like a radioactive downpour and/or upload from the fattest fuckin business-as-usual pockets.
And the film industry wants to tone it all down ? shut us all up ? Roll out the puppeteers and play-along-celebs ?! and keep serving the popcorn !? Sorry, no time for cowards and entertainment holes !
Btw, wondering if the Berlinale Jury had time yet to watch The Killing of Hind Rajab. It might be worth understanding the details of the current geopolitical climate, and precisely HOW a 5-year-old girl ( and 6 members of her family ) were murdered by 335 bullets. And maybe we should be asking a few questions about whether or not Germany is also complicit in some of the world’s myriad problems ! This film is NOT playing this year at the Berlinale… obviously… but some independent cinemas ARE contributing to a counter festival called Palinale ( see Link in Notes below ). Cinemas like City Kino in Wedding and Lichtblick Kino in Prenzlauerberg. There’s many film programmers who are still awake! Let’s show them our gratitude … for keepin it REAL!
There’s alot more to this story, but we’ll have to drop it in a Part 2…. like our visit before we heard the big fallout news to see Ulrike Ottinger talk at the Kinemathek. But it’s really hard to focus on these peripheral high-art stories, which ARE valuable and insightful, when every day things around us are so fucked up and requiring some urgent reaction !
Kunst + Krapital + Collapsing Kultur + A Machinehaus of Total Memory Recall
to be cont.
The old E-werk, now housing the De Kinemathek + Library. Btw, it’s TRUE, there were many who were also super lost in the 90’s too. Here have a glimpse-listen to this gawd-awful apolitical shite-techno-massage set from Dr./Dj Motte, but tie yourself to the mast first and put some industrial-stength wax in your ears ! WTF?! Well, hmm, mysteriously it kept the Electric Sheep happy for a decade or so ! Sorry, truth hurts !
Note: For info about Palinale, see The Left Berlin Events page. The counter festival is primarily announcing their over “70 screenings” on Insta. Haven’t found an easy access program / calendar anywhere else so far. There are also some other counter festival things happening, like Barlinale, Woche Der Kritik, und ? …