The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) calls for the boycott of Berlinale 2025 due to its complicity in Israel’s genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza.
Echoing the call and demands of international film workers and Berlin-based activists, PACBI – a founding member of the BDS National Committee, the largest Palestinian coalition leading the global BDS movement – urges all participants, including filmmakers, jury members, industry members and all others to withdraw from Berlinale to avoid artwashing the German state’s partnership in Israel’s genocide.
Last year, the German political and media establishment viciously attacked filmmakers participating in Berlinale who called for ceasefire in Gaza, and who criticised Israel’s regime of military occupation, apartheid and settler-colonialism against the Palestinian people.
The German federal culture minister Claudia Roth, Berlin’s mayor Kai Wegner and cultural senator Joe Chialo, and even the German head of state Chancellor Olaf Scholz condemned filmmakers who refused to remain silent on Israel’s genocidal assault on besieged Gaza, with a government spokesperson stating that Scholz agrees it "cannot be allowed to stand."
Instead of doing the bare minimum of defending its participating filmmakers’ freedom of expression, the Berlinale leadership shamefully sided with the German government, taking German censorship to the next level. The festival’s executive director even said they “understand the outrage” of racist, anti-Palestinian German politicians.
In stark contrast to the Berlinale’s clear support for Ukrainian and Iranian filmmakers, the festival has entirely failed to denounce Israel’s genocide and underlying system of apartheid, military occupation and settler-colonialism or even mention the tens of thousands of Palestinians that Israel has exterminated in Gaza.
Just last month, Berlinale reported a staff member for expressing solidarity with Palestinians to the German police, compromising their personal safety. In the German context of extreme anti-Palestinian repression, the steady rise of fascism, and deep complicity in arming, defending and shielding Israel’s Gaza genocide from accountability, the Berlinale’s actions constitute egregious complicity in normalizing and whitewashing war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide, the crime of crimes.
Israel, with US, German, UK and other Western complicity, has destroyed life-sustaining conditions in Gaza. Israel’s genocide has included “domicide, urbicide, scholasticide, medicide, cultural genocide and, more recently, ecocide,” according to UN human rights experts.
As the shaky ceasefire agreement in Gaza takes hold, only enormous pressure can finally end Israel’s impunity. Otherwise, the ceasefire may actually enable Israel to continue with a less visible, though no less devastating genocide, while provoking less outrage. Impunity would also allow Israel to continue its massacres and accelerating land theft in the illegally occupied West Bank, especially in East Jerusalem.
Filmmakers have a profound ethical duty to do no harm to the Palestinian struggle, and to avoid whitewashing Israel’s genocide and apartheid regime. This genocide, that includes a journocide, and a cultural genocide, has been committed with the full backing of the German federal government that funds Berlinale – and the festival has consistently sided with the government.
We thank the filmmakers, critics and jury members who have already refused to participate in Berlinale and we call on all others to join them. How can international film workers in good conscience take part in a festival that is complicit in the systematic destruction of Palestinian culture, life and livelihoods?
With the incoming Trump administration threatening marginalised, racialised and vulnerable communities in the US and globally, and with the far-right and fascist forces on the march in Europe, especially in Germany, taking a morally consistent stand for collective liberation and the application of international law has never been more urgent.