Wim Wenders Speaks Out at Berlin Film Festival Awards Ceremony: ‘Cinema Is More Resistant to Oblivion Than the Internet’

Before commencing the presentation of the Competition prizes, Berlin Film Festival jury president Wim Wenders began proceedings with a prepared statement, responding to the controversy that has blighted the festival since its opening-day press conference last week, in which he contentiously declared filmmakers to be “the counterweight of politics, we are the opposite of politics.”

He amended those words in a more nuanced and conciliatory manner tonight, declaring the languages of political activists and cinema artists to be distinct but complementary. His words came notably in the middle of a ceremony that honored several overtly political films, including Perspectives winner “Chronicles From a Siege,” by Palestinian-Syrian filmmaker Abdallah Alkhatib, whose speech lambasted the German government as “partners in the genocide of Gaza by Israel, but you choose not to care.”

Wenders’ own jury, meanwhile, went on to present awards to German-Turkish director Ilker Çatak’s “Yellow Letters,” about the Turkish…