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The Berlinale‘s new director Tricia Tuttle unveiled her inaugural line-up on Tuesday under the scrutiny of press and industry who are waiting to see whether she can get the festival back on track after a tumultuous 2024 edition.
The 19-title competition mixes works by confirmed big names such as Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon Michel Franco’s Dreams, Radu Jude’s Kontinental ’25, Hong Sangsoo’s What Does That Nature Say To You withh second and third movies by rising names such as Léonor Serraille’s Ari and Gabriel Mascaro’s The Blue Trail.
Outside of the competition, Tuttle may have secured a starrier than usual red carpet with previously announced invitations to works such as, among others, Justin Kurzel’s series The Narrow Road To The Deep North with Jacob Elordi, Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17, with Robert Pattinson, and fresh addition A Complete Unknown, with Timothée Chamalet, but she is keeping the full guest list under hat for now.
In the backdrop, Tuttle has also been dealing with the fallout from events that took place ahead of her arrival topped by the closing night row over prizewinner No Other Land and the co-directors criticisms of Israel’s actions in Gaza, which prompted accusations of antisemitism from a clutch of German politicians; long-running funding issues and the thorny question of whether members of the rising far-right AfD party should be on the guest list or not.
Deadline talked to Tuttle on the line-up, achievements and challenges.
DEADLINE: You said that the festival’s past remains relevant to its present as it celebrates its 75th edition. The Berlinale was set up in 1951 to connect citizens of West Berlin with the outside world at a time when they were encircled by Communist East Germany, and it then found new life with the reunification of the city in 1989. What is the driving factor for the festival in 2025?
TRICIA TUTTLE: When we look back on the history of the festival, it’s easy to say, “Oh, it was this thing, or it was that thing?” That’s as one dimensional as it is now when we talk about the reason that we exist.
What I will say is that we’re unique. We are a major A-list festival. I hear from sales agents all the time that we’re a vital marketplace to launch films at the start of the year. We’re also one of the biggest, if not the biggest, audience festivals in the world. We’re at the center of this very political city. It’s a capital city. It’s the seat of federal power, and a third of our funding comes from the federal government.
So, we’re really unique in so many different ways. All of these things, all these tensions play out in the festival. Because I’m across both the business side and the creative side, one of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot, that I wanted to bring to this role was this idea of how do we integrate the different parts of our brain? The marketplace and the public side of the festival had become a bit disconnected… that’s been a real focus for me, how to make these different parts of the brain connect.
And the reason that we exist is still like any great film festival, in the context of all those particulars, it’s to bring people together around a broad range of really, really great cinema. The programming that we do has long been in the DNA of the festival, from Forum, with really, really independent voices, and lately a lot of filmmakers who cross over into the world of art, all the way to a Hollywood blockbuster, and that is, also pretty unique, but Berlin can contain it.
DEADLINE: One criticism from parts of the film world in recent years has been the dearth of star power and big elevated arthouse titles. Is that something that you felt was missing. Was getting stars on the red carpet a priority for you?
TUTTLE: Any festival director of a major festival knows that we need those big, big moments and big films that in their own right are incredibly exciting parts of the program, but also help bring attention and a spotlight to the rest of the program. So absolutely, I don’t think that I’m different in that from the last two directors of the festival.
This year, we’re screening A Complete Unknown which is already having a release in Europe. We’re screening it as a German premiere, and are really excited about it. Moments like that can contribute to the buzz for audiences and the press around the festival as well.
I’m really proud with the program. There’s a good balance between big, heavy hitting names, filmmakers who have their own voice and their own sense of cinema and their own perspective. We’re expecting some stars on the red carpet, quite a few this year, which will be really exciting. It’s the truth, in the 120 years of cinema history, personalities and stars drive our interest films. So it’s something that’s very much a part of our business. It helps audiences break down a program and figure out what they want to see as well.
DEADLINE: You mention A Complete Unknown. Is its star Timothée Chamalet going to be in Berlin. He wasn’t in the first wave of stars that you announced today. Will he be on the list you’re due to put out on February 4?
TUTTLE: That’s something for later.
DEADLINE: Were there films you were aiming for and didn’t get?
TUTTLE: I would rather talk about the films that we do have. This is the case for every festival director. There are films that aren’t finished, and films that have different ideas about when and where they want to premiere. There are hundreds of films on our database, some of which, we might keep tracking for next year, but I really, really proud of the competition lineup. We’re passionate about all the films. We feel like it expresses the breadth of cinema, and it says a lot about the world that we live in.
DEADLINE: It’s also well documented that you came into a very tense situation at the festival, both internally and publicly amid divisions over issues such as the Israel-Hamas conflict and how to deal with the far right AfD Party. How did you deal the divisions within the organisation?
TUTTLE: It’s a process. We’ll always fall short of some people’s expectations… of what they want the Berlinale to be, what they expect the Berlinale to be and it’s not one sided. I really tried to listen and hear and understand what’s going on. I like talking to people. I like hearing their perspectives. I heard many different perspectives on what happened at the festival over the last few years.
Running any festival is a series of calibrations. You’re trying to calibrate a balanced program. As an audience festival, we’re trying to reach out to different audiences. We want to be inclusive. That doesn’t mean we’re always going to able to deliver what people want from us, because this festival is many things to many people.
It’s been a learning curve, being in a new country, being part of a new culture, hearing different perspectives from Germans, has been really important for me this year. I guess empathy and listening is the way I’ve approached it. It’s not been easy, but it’s also been a pleasure.
DEADLINE: You mentioned in the press conference a lot of filmmakers from the Arab world have been reaching out with concerns over what happened last year and whether the festival is a place of open dialogue. Did anybody withhold their film.
TUTTLE: It’s always the filmmakers that we don’t hear from that we’re most worried about. We have a lot of work to do on outreach in the next couple of years. No-one’s pulled their film, no-one’s told us they’re not submitting, but I’m sure that this is the case, because I hear it indirectly from other people.
The biggest anxiety that I hear is not so much about what happened at the festival. It’s more about the context here around the antisemitism resolution [a resolution passed by Germany’s lower house over the summer which critics say impacts free speech especially around criticism of Israel]; the reactions from media and the political establishment at the closing night event and all the discourse around that. That’s the thing that gets fed back to me most and what this means for free speech and discourse at the festival. Just being able to talk to people doesn’t always reassure people, but it quite often does. But so far, no-one said, I’m not submitting my film or I’m pulling my film.
DEADLINE: You took the unusual step of putting out a statement in November in support of No Other Land when a blurb on the Berlin city council’s website in the lead-up to the film’s theatrical release in Germany suggested it was antisemitic. Why did you do that?
TUTTLE: No director of any festival wants to become the story themselves but there are also moments where you can feel certain tensions and misunderstandings building up, and it’s important to speak out. I felt that was the moment. I think it was probably some listings that were not intended in the way that they were generated, and they changed them immediately. But it was very harmful still, and it was very harmful for the filmmakers. I felt it was absolutely the moment to speak up and say we don’t want to disavow what these filmmakers, what all of filmmakers say about their experience of the world.
DEADLINE: The issue of whether members of the far-right party AfD party should be invited to the Berlinale was also a source of tension internally and publicly last year. The party made gains in regional elections over the summer and is polling second in upcoming German Federal election on February 23, how are you planning to deal with the issue this time around. Will they be invited?
TUTTLE: If I sound coy, it’s because, again, I don’t want to become the story. I have said to everyone that we’re just not going to reveal. We never have in the past revealed who’s on our guest list, who’s not on the guest list. It became an issue last year because there was a leak and the festival responded to it. I wouldn’t tell you who Tilda Swinton’s guests were on the guest list. It’s not a political guest list. This is our private guest list. We’re entitled to invite whoever we want to the festival. We get recommendations and then I and the team are thinking about who we want to be in the room, who do we want to extend our hospitality to. That will frame who we invite, but I’m not going to sit and name who we’re adding and who we’re not adding. There were conversations last year about it being anti-democratic to invite some people and not other people, but that’s not the kind of list that we have. It’s a guest list that’s an organic, movable guest list. I’m slightly not answering your question. I appreciate that, but I also just don’t want that to be the conversation that I’m having.
DEADLINE: But if a member an AfD member turns up on opening night, there will be questions, while a festival backed by the state cannot stop a politician from attending?
TUTTLE: What is important for people to hear is that our guest list is an extension of our values as a festival. I don’t want to invite people to our festival who are actively anti-Muslim, actively anti-people from immigration backgrounds. We really believe in creating an inclusive space. So that is going to be the framework when we make decisions on who to invite and who not to invite, it will be partly about making sure that we extend our hospitality to people who share our desire to communicate around film with people who are different from them.
DEADLINE: It also came up in the press conference that additional funding of $1.9M had been announced by the Ministry of Culture, bringing your total annual budget to $12.9M. Berlinale’s recent funding issues have also been well-documented in recent years. Does the festival now have enough?
TUTTLE. We have a balanced budget now for 2025, which is great and it was much needed. Under the the funding system in Germany, no-one’s ever totally surewhat our annual funding is. We’ve asked for extraordinary funding for the last years because of Covid and our costs increasing, but not necessarily the income increasing. I was very hopeful that we would be able to make a balanced budget, and I was pursuing the festival planning as if we were going to be able to. The minister of culture and the media said in her statement yesterday that she wanted to make sure that we had the support in this first year and the 75th anniversary so that we can deliver the festival that we want to deliver.
We also have a huge responsibility to raise income. I also always knew that I was coming into a festival that had financial challenges so that wasn’t a surprise. But what was a surprise, amongst many other things, was that our partner and sponsor portfolio changed right when I started. We immediately set about on working on sponsors and I’m really, really pleased that we got the federal money but also that Cupra has joined as a main sponsor and MasterCard has moved up to level to become a main sponsor for this year, and Armani beauty is back.
DEADLINE: You’ve replaced the second main competition of Encounters with the new competition Perspectives focused on first films. What was the thinking behind this?
TUTTLE: I really believe in the legacy sections of the festival but perspectives was important for me too, because we are all interested in discovering filmmakers. New voices that’s always been a part of the festival, but the nominations used to go across all the different sections of the festival, and I felt that the reflected glow was getting lost. The new competition creates a profile for 14 for 13 other films. I also think there’s marketplace interest in this and this is where it comes to wanting to bring the two sides of the brain a little bit more together to make sure the marketplace is really interested in the public program, and that films sell, and go from where we’re launching them at the Berlinale to countries and territories all over the world.
I also love first-time filmmakers, you get some of the most original, untethered-by-expectation filmmakers. What you’d see in our 14 films is really the genuine breadth and diversity of cinema, from very quiet, personal, intimate films, to wild, imaginative, crazy, bold films with this aesthetic that you haven’t seen elsewhere. So that’s really nice thing to see from first time filmmakers,
DEADLINE: In terms of the Main Competition, are there any main undercurrents or themes?
TUTTLE: I don’t think this is unique to us, but there are a lot of really interesting stories that are centered around women’s voices in the program but that’s been true at other festivals this year. One of the things that I think is similar to Perspectives is that the selection really does express that range of cinema in competition.
You have a film like Gabriel Mascaro’s O ultimo azul (The Blue Trail), which has this other worldly language that mixes sort of realism and a sort of magical quality to it. It’s a film about psychedelic blue snails and a septuagenarian retiree who goes on a road trip to avoid being retired. Then you have something like Léonor Serraille’s Ari, which is very quiet and intimate. There are also films that deal with directly with sharp, real world politics, like Radu Jude’s new film Kontinental ’25, which is incredibly well written, and it deals with a lot of the issues that we’re all facing around the rise in nationalism and the housing crisis. There’s a range in terms of themes and the art form.
