At a time when the “cost of living” crisis undermines the wellbeing of millions and when for besieged Palestinians in Gaza it rather represents a literal risk of being wiped off the face of the earth focus on the realm of the arts can seem peripheral. So close attention to the recent acceptance speech of actor Tilda Swinton of her Golden Bear lifetime achievement award at the 75th Berlin International Film Festival, the Berlinale, may seem trivial in comparison.

But not for nothing did Plato banish a proportion of artists from his ideal state of the Republic! Swintons carefully crafted and paced acceptance speech in which she named (“for the sake of clarity”) that “the inhumane is being perpetrated on our watch” in the form of “state perpetrated and internationally enabled mass murder” (which is terrorising populations despite monitoring bodies amid “the unacceptable complacency of our greed addicted governments who make nice with planet wreckers and war criminals wherever they come from”) is extraordinary for reasons which need to be enumerated.

In order to appreciate the salience of this speech, it is necessary to contextualise it. Not only in the sense of the global events to which it alludes (which, significantly, are both clearly signposted in their magnitude and unspecified in terms of geographical setting/s). But also regarding the location in which the speech was delivered Berlin, Germany in which, ironically, state-sponsored repression of those who peacefully protest the terrorism enacted upon the people of Palestine (i.e. rather than censure of the policies of Western and European governments which enable this carnage to which the protesters are reacting) is reaching seismic proportions.

One illustration of this is the official response to the visit of UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, whose recent address required a change of venue and incurred a police presence in the audience (i.e. additional to external “security”), whose invited speaking engagements at German universities were cancelled without warning or apology, and who experienced Germany as palpably inhospitable to the delivery of said talks which should have proceeded without incident “I have to admit that 75 hours in this country has made me pretty nervous because the situation is bad for freedom of expression pretty much everywhere and still Ive never felt this sense of lacking oxygen as I do here”.

Commenting in the lead-up to the recent German election, economist, activist, and former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis went so far as to decry “the emergence of a totalitarian police state in Germany” “there is a clear and present dissolution of any semblance of democracy, not to mention free speech, in the heart of Europe”; “Democracy is now just a word in Germany”, which is “moving inexorably into a totalitarian abyss like in the past”.

The particular context of Germany as incubator and enactor of the Nazi Holocaust of 1933-45 imparts corresponding particularity to the zeal with which the actions of the state of Israel are now supported, and any criticism of them (including by anti-Zionist Jews) is ruthlessly suppressed. With reference to historian Andrew I. Port, Pankaj Mishra says “[i]t is almost as though by claiming to be the culture most dedicated to memorialising the Shoah, Germany managed to avoid reckoning with the crimes that necessitated that culture in the first place”.

There are other dynamics than desperate attempts to atone for its Nazi history that fuel the current German drive to silence those who speak out against Israeli Government atrocities. Mishra cites Marweckis description of the “exchange structure specific to German-Israeli relations”: moral absolutism of an insufficiently denazified and still profoundly antisemitic Germany in return for cash and weapons. This is in tandem with “the old mechanism of sanitising Germany by demonising Muslims”. Current German government persecution and prosecution of those who peacefully oppose Israeli and Western government enabled genocide in Gaza is “not specific to Germany”. But “in Germany it has reached an unprecedented level”.

Which lends potent valence to the location in which Tilda Swinton delivered her acceptance speech of the Golden Bear award for lifetime achievement in cinema. For this was not just “any” biennale. Rather it was the _Berlin_ale a special coinage of the term with all the symbolic weight and freight that reattributed imprimatur implies.

Swinton is not alone among artists in rejecting attempts to quarantine the arts from comment on the exercise of power (even as arts managerial boards and administrators as we know from current high-profile cases here are taking the censoring of artists to a whole new level.) Particularly pertinent to note here is both the prior 2024 acceptance speech of director Jonathan Glazer of the Oscar for Best International Feature The Zone of Interest (which addressed from an oblique angle the horror of the Nazi Holocaust) and that Glazer, who is Jewish, used his speech to refute hijacking of the Holocaust “by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. [w]hether the victims of October 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization. How do we resist?”

Additionally, in February 2024, the Berlin International Film Festival awarded Best Documentary to No Other Land, which reported on Israels forced eviction of Palestinian villages in the West Bank and which still awaits distribution in the US “Accepting the award, one of its directors, Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, condemned the war in Gaza and called for a ceasefire”. Following which the non-Jewish mayor of Berlin, Kai Wegner, “retorted that such remarks were unacceptable [!] and that antisemitism [i.e. Wegners characterisation of the call by this award-winning Jewish director for a ceasefire in Gaza] “has no place in Berlin”.

Such is the near surreal backdrop to Tilda Swintons acceptance speech on 13February 2025 at the 75th Berlinale of the Golden Bear award for lifetime achievement in cinema. She began with the greeting “Dear Fellow Humans” (immediate signposting of collegiality not only with her in vivo audience of film luminaries but of solidarity with all people). And proceeded to present a carefully paced yet extraordinarily audacious speech which was as warm and engaging as it became unexpectedly searing and confronting before returning to tender connection with the very audience members she had just challenged (to, presumably, a sense of stupefaction on the part of many of them even as the intermittent applause by some had been strong and enthusiastic).

How was this done and why was and is it so powerful? Swinton began with personal reminiscence of her first attendance at the Berlinale at the age of 25 ("on the hunt for amazement, solidarity and connection”; “I found it all here in one fell swoop and Ive never been without it since”). She described “40 years of comradeship and friendship of film makers from around the planet”, “the faithful community of the global cinema audience”, and “above all the boundaryless possibilities of film making itself”. From which she proceeded to describe the distinctive experience of immersion in film ("_the leap of faith, the smoke and mirrors, the beam of light"); “_a feast for the heart, a tonic for the soul”). Film she described as “available to all humans”; stimulating and affording both bravery and safety ("the growing possibility of seeing more than one side of things; feeling yourself challenged, tested Taking your values between finger and thumb and examining them there")

She was glad, she said, that it was snowing on this day as it had back in 1986 on her first Berlinale visit and when the Golden Bear awards were inaugurated “Heres what occurred to us back then we can do better as human beings”. And “now, as then, in a present where it has never been more pressing to consider”, it is necessary to weigh “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”.

Thus came the change of pace and tone almost seamless but also palpably perceptible. We can, Swinton said, “head for the great independent state of cinema and rest there an unlimited realm, innately inclusive, immune to efforts of occupation, colonisation, takeover, ownership, or the development of Riviera property”. Here she allowed a longer pause amid applause and audience cheers for the first time as she looked out at her audience resolutely before resuming “a borderless realm and with no policy of exclusion, persecution or deportation” (applause again and the same pause and look); “No known address, no visa required”.

“Its so very, very good for us”, Swinton continued (in the comment which preceded her reference to “state perpetrated and internationally enabled mass murder”) “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. rather than resign ourselves to submission to an entitled domination and the astonishing savagery of spite”.

Freedom, she said, rests on agreement “in the naming of repressive and inhumane criminal movements whenever and where ever”; in “the settled acknowledgment that being FOR something does not ever imply being ANTI anyone. That being FOR humane solidarity means for humane solidarity with all humans invested in common decency and fair representation”.

On the path to which cinema has a key role to play. Big screens should be supported “wherever they are”, distributors should not discriminate regarding where films are shown, and streaming services should be encouraged to spend “some of their squillions on building, renovating and enlivening cinemas” here she raised her voice to further cheers “in every territory they reach” (“in refugee camps, in schools, and care homes”); WARUM DENN NICHT?"(Why not?)

In the final moments of her speech, Swinton returned to assumed agreement ("humans, friends") that “when the chips are down as might be interpreted at this point in history with particular sharpness” a revived internationalist cinema “_can lend us the pause, the breath, the reflection that might embolden us to take the best part of ourselves”, “_on the path to believing, against all odds, in the practical feasibility of fairness on earth, to building brave faith in, and voting for, reliable human accord in an inviolable respect among us all, without exception, for DIFFERENCE [strong emphasis on this word] and dignity”.

Swinton did not name the perpetrators of the “state perpetrated and internationally enabled mass murder” she decried. Because in her warning that “the inhumane is being perpetrated on our watch” she did not exempt any of us from complicity. And when in speaking of the disproportionate role cinema has in enlivening the senses, stimulating reflection, and “seeing more than one side of things” (“feeling yourself challenged, testedtaking your values between finger and thumb and examining them there”) she threw a velvet gauntlet both to her immediate audience (as she effectively equated issuing of her lifetime achievement award with agreement with the views she expressed in accepting it; “When you honour me, you honour all the above”) and to all humans (that form of salutation clearly intentional!) In a final allusive pun, she exclaimed “it is all to play for”. And as her powerful speech eloquently charted and conveyed, the stakes in all ways could scarcely be higher.