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Middle East crisis, Ukraine and far right combine to disrupt Berlin film festival


Jury president Lupita Nyong’o and colleagues were involved in a heated press conference opening a film festival with a history of political engagement

The most political of the big international film festivals is bracing for an even more “spicy” edition than usual, Berlinale jury president Lupita Nyong’o said, as geopolitical tensions bubbled to the surface during the opening press conference. Last year Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy was invited to rally artists and film-makers with a rousing speech at the opening gala, and in the early 2010s organisers reacted to the events of the Arab spring by setting up a designated programme of films from the region. No Other Land, a documentary by a Palestinian-Israeli collective of four young activists, documents the slow-motion eradication of Palestinian villages in the West Bank, while Romanian film-maker Andrei Cohn’s Holy Week explores racism and antisemitism at the end of the 19th century.

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