Culture

It sounds like the plot of a screenplay, but it happened to two Berlin film students in real life.  Moritz Henneberg and Julius Drost had created an animated short film for their final project at university. "Butty" tells the tale of a household robot that gets kicked out when it can't do its job properly. When the two filmmakers posted the work on YouTube, this touching tale quickly went viral. After generating a huge amount of hits, the duo decided to submit their work to festivals — but they were in for a shock: Organizers told them the film had already been submitted under a different name.  How could that have happened? US student Samuel Felinton had downloaded the film, made minimal edits, given it a new title, "T-130," and got rid of the original credits. As the alleged autho...

An emergency meeting Thursday morning of the organization that manages the Berlin International Film Festival, or Berlinale, has left the future of the festival's current head, Tricia Tuttle, open-ended, as the festival continues to reel from controversy related to the Israel-Hamas war.  The meeting had been called by State Minister for Culture Wolfram Weimer to discuss incidents at the recent Berlinale in which, among other things, artists expressed solidarity with Gaza and criticized festival and jury leadership for their approach to handling the conflict within the festival sphere.  Weimer's office issued the following statement after the meeting:  "This morning, a meeting of the supervisory board of the KBB GmbH [the Berlinale management organization] took place in the Chancellery. ...

Travel can sometimes place us in a moral dilemma. A sense of unease may arise from everyday realities — the carbon emissions caused by flying, for example, or the broader consequences of modern mass tourism. Is this simply something to accept? Should we simply stop traveling or are there better ways to do it? For Wolfgang Strasdas, the answer is clear: "I don't think we need to feel guilty at all," says the scientific director of the Center for Sustainable Tourism in Berlin, who has studied the impacts of travel for many years. In many parts of the world, tourism is a key economic sector and an important driver of prosperity. Even so, he argues that certain factors deserve careful consideration in advance, particularly the environmental footprint of a trip and the pressures associated wi...

Minister of State for Culture Wolfram Weimer intends to dismiss Tricia Tuttle, head of the Berlin International Film Festival, German daily Bild reported on Wednesday, citing sources within the organization responsible for the Berlinale's management, the "Kulturveranstaltungen des Bundes in Berlin GmbH" (KBB).   Bild reportedly obtained the confirmation from the Culture Ministry that Weimer is calling an extraordinary meeting of the KBB on Thursday, but no official announcement as to Tuttle's dismissal has been made yet. According to Bild, Weimer and Tuttle agree that she could not remain at the helm of the renowned film festival, following the political backlash generated by speeches at the awards ceremony on February 22. Bild also mentions a picture that allegedly compromises Tuttle's...

It sounds like the plot of a screenplay, but it happened to two Berlin film students in real life.  Moritz Henneberg and Julius Drost had created an animated short film for their final project at university. "Butty" tells the tale of a household robot that gets kicked out when it can't do its job properly. When the two filmmakers posted the work on YouTube, this touching tale quickly went viral. After generating a huge amount of hits, the duo decided to submit their work to festivals — but they were in for a shock: Organizers told them the film had already been submitted under a different name.  How could that have happened? US student Samuel Felinton had downloaded the film, made minimal edits, given it a new title, "T-130," and got rid of the original credits. As the alleged autho...

This year's Berlin International Film Festival prize winners, and their acceptance speeches, make clear the difficult tightrope along which the festival has to walk. Closing a 10-day festival that had been marked by a social media storm surrounding jury president Wim Wenders' comment that filmmakers should "stay out of politics," the films that were selected to win the top awards, Ilker Catak's "Yellow Letters" and Emin Alper's "Salvation," demonstrated that the Berlinale remains the most political of Europe's three big film festivals, next to Cannes and Venice. Despite an open letter's accusations of "censorship" of the artists speaking out on Gaza, various award winners also used their acceptance speeches to make political statements on the issue. Palestinian prize-winner's comment le...

The films couldn't be more different. "No Good Men," by Afghan filmmaker Shahrbanoo Sadat is a feel-good romantic comedy. "Roya," by Iranian director Mahnaz Mohammadi, is a distressing psychological drama. Despite their contrasting styles, the works have one thing in common: They feature the distinctive directorial approaches of two female filmmakers who drew on their personal experiences of injustice in their autocratic home countries. "No Good Men" and "Roya" both celebrated their world premiere at this year's Berlin International Film Festival.Strong women in front of and behind camera at BerlinaleTo view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video A romantic comedy set amid Afghanistan's political emergency   Shahrbanoo Sad...

The Golden Bear, the Berlin International Film Festival's top prize, was awarded on Saturday to the political drama "Yellow Letters," by German director Ilker Catak. His previous film, "The Teachers' Lounge" (2023) was nominated for an Oscar. Starring Tansu Bicer in the role of a playwright and Ozgu Namal as a famous actress, "Yellow Letters" follows the married artists whose relationship is tested as they get caught in the state's crosshairs. The allegory on authoritarian oppression is set in contemporary Turkey, but was shot in Germany, with Berlin and Hamburg taking on the roles of Ankara and Istanbul.  "Yellow Letters" was decidedly the most political of all 22 works in the main competition, an apt conclusion to an event overshadowed by political debates — starting with the festival...

"All Quiet on the Western Front," Erich Maria Remarque's book, is the portrait of a generation that euphorically left school to head to the front, but who died in the cogs of the grueling machinery of war. At the beginning of the 20th century, people were actually yearning for the First World War. It was a period of radical change and insecurity. Technical progress set the pace — factories, cars, scientific discoveries. Cracks were starting to form in patriarchal society. Women were rebelling against prescribed roles and were demanding more rights. Some things were coming to an end, while innovations were sweeping in at a rapid pace, overwhelming people — particularly men. War, many thought, could be a "purifying force" that would stop, or slow down, change. They celebrating the outbreak...

December 1914. World War I had been raging for five months. Between minefields and barbed-wire fences, millions of soldiers faced each other in trenches along the Western Front, sometimes only some 30 meters apart. The combat zone stretched from the English Channel through Belgium and France to the Swiss border. As the war dragged on, soldiers huddled in their dugouts, where rats, lice, the cold and poor food wore them down, and death hung over them. Beyond the trenches, between the enemy lines, lay the muddy hell of no man's land, where the bodies of fallen comrades lay out of reach. Disillusionment at the front The war had already claimed hundreds of thousands of lives — English, French, Belgian and German — torn apart by grenades, riddled with machine-gun fire and impaled in hand-to-...