Good evening.

After 8 festival years we thought: Why not tell you what an event like the Berlin Critics’ Week costs? So here we go: In a good year, we spend about 50.000€. In a bad one, 2022 for example, only about 20.000€. Every year team members work for so-called “symbolic fees”, which you might know from your own projects and which don’t seem to have such a poetic name by accident. Some of us worked without fees. We were motivated by a love for the cause, that is, for cinema, which is obviously more than a cause. But we also did it out of a lack of alternatives and a certain perplexity. We didn’t know how else the event could be possible. The largest chunk of our money is needed each year to bring as many directors of our programs as possible to Berlin, plus around 30 guests who are speakers on our panels – and also the members of our selection committee, a number of whom live abroad. For us it is meaningful to be able to meet and talk together in one place. Despite our efforts, many of the filmmakers whose work we have selected over the years have not been able to present their films in person at our festival.

The Berlin Critics’ Week has been going for 8 years without the support of the Berlinale. As self-employed cultural workers, we were and still are dependent on the support of certain successful companies and institutions that afford us structural strength. Places that give visibility to our discussions, not least was this important during the pandemic. Without the Hackesche Höfe Kino and our cooperation with the Akademie der Künste, the Berlin Critics’ Week would hardly have been feasible last year. Petra has already thanked several of our other partners in the name of our group. 

Why so much transparency? This year, when we discuss matters of care and ask our guests to reveal their work ethics in public, we thought it would be nice to do the same. You should know that we are occasionally pretty strict with each other when we work at Critics’ Week. As a collective of festival directors – which consists of Amos Borchert, Elena Friedrich, Petra Palmer, and me – we discuss a lot – about the distribution of money and work, about hierarchies and decisions, about the demands of a festival and the limits of what is possible, about jobs we have to take on the side and childcare during Zoom meetings. We have, at times, had to accept failure, and we haven’t always been able to support each other. During the last 3 years several people gave up and decided not to continue being a festival director of the Berlin Critics’ Week – due to overwork, poor pay and the lack of time for other projects. Our event is particularly vulnerable. We are exposed to the challenges of the festival industry and precarious cultural work in general due to our small size. Yet, the working conditions of events like ours are not really reducible to questions of pay, but they are to a large extent a question of cooperation, of dealing with each other, of responsibility for each other.

The debates that are at the core of the Berlin Critics’ Week – both on and off stage – have taught us a lot about care. Again and again it has been made clear: a debate can hardly be productive without empathy, without trust, without caring for the other person or persons involved. This feels especially true on stage, and within an industry in which “real talk” has become very rare. A debate matters when all parties involved are willing to take responsibility for what they say and, therefore, something is really at stake – be it emotional, or idealistic. Successful debates require that all participants care about the reactions and situations of their counterparts, and that eventually they dare to care for their counterparts.

There is something that only a debate can reveal: caring and conflict are not mutually exclusive. Who wants to argue with someone, or enter into a relationship, if it’s not possible to disagree with each other – to agree on a disagreement? Who wants a friendship in which questions cannot be answered openly and frustrations cannot be voiced? Understanding the ethics of care only as a principle of healing, of leaving out differences and conflicts, moves the concept away from the societies and political moment of today – in which tensions are obviously unavoidable. Without considering the relation between care and dissent, it feels self-centered and privileged to speak today, here in Berlin, about interpersonal issues, about dependency and connectedness, about supporting the elderly and those who suffer from mental health issues, about dealing with the planet, about mindful coexistence and cultural work – while nearby wars rage and mindfulness simply means not getting shot. Understanding care as an ethics of living together – and understanding it, in Joan Tronto’s words, as “everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible” – is impossible without also talking about mindfulness in conflicts. is impossible without also talking about strategies that emphasize how indispensable it is to act together rather than against each other, although we might see the world from different perspectives.

At Critics’ Week, discussing our viewpoints on contemporary politics when creating this year’s programme has been an encounter with notions of care for us. We argued more about politics than before, individuals distanced themselves from particular films; we disagreed, were unsettled or sometimes irritated by each other. We tried to take doubts seriously in the group, to remain curious, to listen and respond to each other, to research together, to share information, insights and questions with each other. We wanted to trust and build on each other, learn from each other. And we hope that in our public discussion of the films in our program, a form of trust, a shared learning – and perhaps even a sense of care – can also emerge. 

Care is not optional. In relation to a work of art and its makers it should at least imply meeting them without preconceptions, and the willingness to examine their backgrounds. It implies also that we accept the challenge that a work of art poses to us as viewers, even if it overwhelms us. We have tried to accept how our films and filmmakers have challenged us this year. We reacted to them and challenged them as well. We have responded to very recent films and created evenings during which these will meet like our guests do. We hope the films we screen can be questioned from contemporary perspectives, but also, for the first time, from historical perspectives, with our retro screenings. In addition to our regular programs and debates, this year we are showing three specials designed to expand the frame of our debates. Among these works is the new film by Dominik Graf, which we are not screening simply because the Berlinale isn’t – but because it is an example of a caring and mindful approach to political concepts and political history here in Germany, which is in this moment very much needed. We are also playing more films this year than in previous years – not for the sake of volume, but in order to see cinema from a wider angle even in the most heated debates.

In this spirit, we would like to cordially invite you to the Berlin Critics’ Week: to shared days full of passionate, but also, hopefully, caring debates – in the cinema, with cinema, and through cinema in the world.

Have a good discussion, but please save your questions until the end.

Amos Borchert, Dennis Vetter, Elena Friedrich, Petra Palmer