A controversial Berlinale bookended by dueling Israeli hostage films

Things took a concerning turn during last year’s edition, when the festival filed criminal charges against an employee for making statements from the fest’s official social media account, which it deemed antisemitic (the posts, preserved here, demanded acknowledgement of Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza). Unfortunately, this year’s festival was no different. In the lead up to the event, back in December 2024, a part-time staff member was allegedly reported to the police for sharing pro-Palestine statements in official communication. During the festival itself, Hong Kong director Jun Li (whose film Queerpanorama was programmed) sparked a police probe by speaking on behalf of Palestine, though at press time, no one appears to have reached out to the filmmaker.

In Germany, there’s been a chilling effect in recent months when it comes to speaking out in favor of Palestine; for instance, several activists were arrested during a rally earlier this month. Making such persecution easier is the fact that in November, a new German law went into effect conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitic hate speech. At this year’s festival, some figures made highly visible public statements while likely keeping these specifics in mind—for instance, actress Tilda Swinton, who was awarded a Golden Bear for lifetime achievement on the festival’s opening night.  During her acceptance speech, Swinton decried “the astonishing savagery of state-perpetrated and intentionally enabled mass murder,” albeit without naming specific countries. Given the German government’s continued arming of Israel, it’s hard not to infer who Swinton might have meant, since the culture ministry remains heavily involved in the Berlinale.

The festival’s leadership underwent a significant transition last year, with the BFI London Film Festival’s Tricia Tuttle replacing co-directors Carlo Chatrian and Mariëtte Rissenbeek. On his way out, Chatrian claimed to have quit the position because the ministry had demanded veto power of the festival’s lineup. To what degree this power was used to influence the 2025 program isn’t known; the fest featured the Gaza sports documentary Yalla Parkour, so there likely wasn’t a blanket mandate against Palestinian voices. However, the presence of two documentaries about Israeli hostages taken captive on Oct. 7, 2023 speaks to a specific political slant, especially since one of them—Tom Shoval’s Michtav Le'David, or A Letter to David—was a notably major part of the festival’s opening night, by way of vigils held for its subject, actor David Cunio. Tuttle was in attendance, though she also later spoke in solidarity with those affected in Gaza. The festival’s closing night, meanwhile, saw the other hostage movie in the lineup, Brandon Kramer’s Holding Liat, bestowed with the Best Documentary trophy—the same award given to No Other Land last year.

These two films bookending the festival helps create specific political parameters around the event, and they each make for intriguing case studies, too. Where A Letter to David is blinkered in its approach, Holding Liat attempts to wrestle with the idea of un-learning, by widening the scope of its conversation in a way the former film does not. Both are about Israelis taken from the Nir Oz kibbutz on Oct. 7, 2023, by Hamas fighters during the Al Aqsa Flood, a premise which Shoval’s documentary approaches in an intriguingly self-reflexive way. David and his twin brother Eitan starred in Shoval’s 2013 Berlinale selection Youth, a film about a kidnapping, whose footage and behind-the-scenes videos are re-purposed for A Letter to David.

The film is essayistic in its analysis of Shoval’s previous output. It goes on intriguing tangents about the editing choices he made on Youth, before the filmmaker (by way of voiceover) notes that his story—about Israeli brothers forced to kidnap a woman out of desperation—caused him to view the characters’ actions with nuance and complexity beyond black-and-white binaries. However, both Shoval and A Letter to David stop short of ever applying this empathetic understanding of the act of kidnapping to the people who took David hostage.

To discuss the film or its subject matter critically is to wade into thorny political territory, if only because of how the topic of returning Israeli hostages (by way of the slogan “Bring Them Home”) has turned into a rallying cry used to manufacture consent for genocide. This is especially true in the United States—another major government that has continued to arm the Israeli state through a death toll likely well into the six figures—where the putting up and tearing down of hostage posters have become deeply politicized acts. As it happens, the politicized nature of Israeli hostages (and their families) is a key topic in Holding Liat. The movie follows its director’s relative, Yehuda Beinin, the father of one such abductee as he tries to secure his daughter’s release, while navigating his own pacifist beliefs and his new position as a sponsored figurehead sent on a visit to Washington, D.C.

Of the two hostage films, only Holding Liat widens its scope of history enough to even acknowledge that Nir Oz, founded in 1955, was—like many other kibbutzim—built atop what had been a Palestinian village until 1948. The lack of this wider context (concerning any violence and oppression enacted by Israel upon Palestine prior to October 2023) has often been used to bolster the claim that the ongoing conflict was purely an outcome of Hamas’ incursion—to say nothing of the fact that Israel has long held a significant number of Palestinians captive too. Yehuda attempts to bring this up during his political tour as well, though he's given strict instructions and talking points by his handlers.

The two documentaries exist in fascinating conversation with one another, because while A Letter to David talks explicitly about the art and technique of editing, Holding Liat takes aim at the ethics of editing—of the decision making involved—in more than just a cinematic sense. Editing defines movies as an art form, and it’s a matter of not just what’s seen, but what’s unseen. All that goes unsaid is part of a narrative too, so it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to call A Letter to David propaganda by omission (at best, it’s a film that fails to be rigorous enough in its artistic self-reflections).

It isn’t difficult to stir sentiment by aiming one’s camera at the charred remains of a kibbutz dwelling. Both movies in question do this. However, Holding Liat more effectively wrestles with the meaning and impact of its own images—even when its ostensible protagonist, Yehuda, reaches the limits of his empathy and understanding (his brother Joel speaks in more detail about the history of the kibbutz, and the violence enacted by the Israeli ethnostate).

The jury may have awarded Holding Liat, but the festival’s centering of A Letter to David during its opening festivities stands out sorely. It makes the Berlinale seem all the more willing to endorse its obfuscating narratives, even though Kramer’s arguably superior film proves Shoval’s dangerously incomplete. Such omissions, which focus only on the superficial details of the Al Aqsa flood rather than its ideology or outcomes, create—intentionally or otherwise—a sense of symmetry about the Israel-Palestine conflict since Oct. 7, as though any retaliatory action by the Israeli state were justified, without the possibility of Oct. 7 itself being framed in a broader political context. Even Abraham, in his Berlin acceptance speech for No Other Land, was attempting to highlight the inequities that still exist between himself and his Palestinian colleague Adra, when the festival distanced itself from his statement.

Film festivals are, at least nominally, dedicated to artistic and individual expression, a line even Tuttle believes it’s her duty to walk. But for two years in a row, the Berlinale has proven that artists making statements in support of preserving human life and dignity in Palestine—or in opposition to state investment in war machinery and apartheid—do not align with the mission of those who have a say in whether the festival receives its funding, or goes ahead at all. That the festival also highlighted this tension through its programming, in the form of two documentaries bound by a common subject matter, but separated by artistic ideology, is remarkably fitting.