Last Thursday, actress Tilda Swinton received an honorary Golden Bear Award at the Berlin Film Festival (Berlinale) in recognition of her long and outstanding film career.
Swinton chose to attend despite calls by the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) Movement to boycott the event. This followed allegations of antisemitism at last year’s festival. The allegations were levelled at Palestinian film-maker Basel Adra and the Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham after their acceptance speech for winning the Best Documentary prize for No Other Land, a film about Israel’s destruction of 19 Palestinian hamlets in the West Bank known collectively as Masafer Yatta.
At the 2024 Berlinale event, Abraham denounced the Israeli system of apartheid. He called for a ceasefire in Gaza, while Adra used the opportunity to urge Germany to cease exports of arms to Israel. Abraham received death threats on social media for his efforts, while his family in Israel were physically threatened at their home.
In this hostile environment for anyone who dared criticize Israel, Tilda was one of the few celebrities who bravely challenged Israel’s military retaliation on Gaza as early as October 2023 while also calling for a ceasefire.
Unfazed by the outcome of this debacle at Berlinale 2024, Swinton read out a carefully prepared speech which lambasted newly elected US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu without actually naming them directly. There can, however, be no mistaking what she meant and who the recipients of her displeasure were, and the audience picked up on it immediately.
Her scathing remarks, which reference Trump and Netanyahu’s diabolical plans to dispossess Palestinians of their land, can be found on the YouTube video timeline from 4:07 onwards. I couldn’t find an official transcript, so I used one provided by YouTube and added my punctuation where necessary.
We like to think we dignified the cinema we made with our dissidence, our resistance and our determination to find a communion to have faith in.
Here’s what occurred to us back then; we can do better as human beings. Nothing surer, and on our way we can do worse than foraging in the cinema, in art, for the breadcrumbs through the forest to understand exactly how.
Now, as then, in a present when it has perhaps never been more pressing to consider, to weigh with reverance and maturity what sovereignty means to humans. What history and legacy and an evolved culture might be worth to our sense of ourselves and even what being human means and is worth at all.
We can head for the great independent state of cinema and rest there, an unlimited realm, innately inclusive, immune to efforts of occupation, colonization, takeover, ownership, or the development of Riviera property. A borderless ream and with no policy of exclusion, persecution or deportation. No known address, no Visa required.
It’s so very very good for us to wonder at the world and to be surprised by admiration for each other rather than shocked speechless by our cavalier mean-spiritedness and cruelty. To notice our myriad variations and to unite in celebrating them rather than resign ourselves to a submission to entitled domination and the astonshing savagery of spite.
State perpetrated and internationally enabled mass murder is currently actively terrorizing more than one part of our world, currently condemned by the very bodies specifically set up by humans to monitor things on Earth unacceptable to human society.
These are facts. They need to be faced. So for the sake of clarity let’s name it.
The inhumane is being perpetrated on our watch. I’m here to name it without hesitation or doubt in my mind. And to lend my unwavering solidarity to all those who recognize the unacceptable complacency of our greed-addicted governments who make nice with planet wreckers and war criminals wherever they come from….
While Trump and Netanyahu attracted most of the rebuke, all Western governments who colluded with them to unleash a 15-month orgy of death and destruction on the Palestinian people also got an honorary reprimand.
At this stage, there doesn’t appear to be any consequences for Swinton’s courage. However, Israel has a long history of vindictiveness, so I hope it stays that way.
lenny unencumbered 