American director Todd Haynes, the president of the international jury of the 75th Berlinale, said on Thursday that the United States is “in a state of particular crisis” under President Donald Trump as jury member after jury member decried the global rise of the right wing as a threat to filmmakers everywhere.
More than living up to its reputation as the most political of the major film festivals, a press conference on its opening day by the jury that will pick the festival’s top prize Golden Bear winner in 10 days time gave members a chance to warn about what they see as challenges facing their industry.
“We’re in a state of particular crisis right now in the United States, but also globally,” said Haynes, one of the foremost independent directors in the U.S. whose films include the lesbian romance “Carol” in 2015 and a 2007 Bob Dylan bio-pic, “I’m Not There”.
“And I think everyone I know in the United States and friends abroad are witnessing this barrage of actions in the first three weeks of the Trump administration with tremendous concern, shock. I think that’s been part of the strategy to create a sense of destabilisation and a kind of shock.
“So how do we proceed toward coalescing different forms of resistance? We have to try to coalesce different forms of resistance, of resilience,” Haynes said.
He added that he thought Trump voters would quickly become disillusioned when prices for consumer goods do not come down, as Trump promised they would during the election campaign.
And he also said the new administration, which has already made forays into the cultural world by sacking the head of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, would pose a problem for filmmakers.
“How this return of this Trump presidency will affect filmmaking is a real question hanging over all American filmmakers,” he said, adding, “I think always with filmmaking in particular, the financing question is complicated.”
Haynes’s concerns were seconded by jury panelist and director Rodrigo Moreno of Argentina, whose country’s right-wing President Javier Milei campaigned wielding a chainsaw and has come after arts funding with a vengeance.
“The situation in Argentina, of course, it’s one year we’ve been having this government crazy guy, total fascist, pronouncing…every day against gays, against scientists, against educators, against filmmakers, artists. So it’s a nightmare for us,” Moreno said.
He said that for years the country’s filmmakers benefited from a French-style system that used a portion of cinema ticket purchases to fund filmmaking.
“That allows us to make our beautiful cinematography from Argentina of all the last 20 years…But now everything was defunded. So this year there was zero films produced by the National Film Institute, which is a tragedy for us.
“But we will keep on making films anyway with cell phones, with whatever. The main problem is the workers, the old people, the poor people which is increasing every day in Argentina. That’s the real problem we have now with this kind of policies and economical situations.”
Director Nabil Ayouch of Morocco said that even his country, which he said was ruled by what he called a “good king” (Mohammed VI), was not immune from the rise of the right wing.
“Sometimes people think that we artists live in a bubble. We don’t live in a bubble, we don’t have privileges, we take risks every day,” Ayouch said.
“And I think that, facing some people, like the one we were talking about in the U.S. right now, thinking that he can buy the whole world, he can buy Gaza, he can buy Greenland, he can buy Panama. We have to be strong everywhere in the world, including in Africa, because we can be the next ones.”
The International Jury will announce its selections for the winner of the top Golden Bear award for best film, and other categories, on Saturday, February 22.

— By Michael Roddy