Film festivals and wars: 2025 – The year of double standards

This article takes 2025 as the point of departure to compare how the main European film festivals – Berlin, Cannes, and Venice – have responded to the invasions of Ukraine and Gaza. The analysis approaches film festivals as highly visible cultural events, which actively shape public opinion and cultural memory around major issues of the past and present, including war. Continuing their long history of political engagement in wartime contexts, the Cannes, Berlin, and Venice festivals responded to Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine with immediate and unambiguous expressions of solidarity. In contrast, it was only in 2025, two years into Israel’s aggression on Gaza, that more substantial activities addressing the genocide appeared in these three festivals, including the Cannes tribute to Gazan photojournalist Fatima Hassouna (1999-2025). The year 2025 is pivotal for global war-related politics: from Trump’s return to office in January; to peaceful pro-Palestinian protesters being arrested globally; to the Trump administration’s peace plan and ceasefire in October, followed by repeated violations only days later. Against this backdrop, this article analyses the interplay between global politics and film festival responses to war. Its central question is why these institutions unanimously supported Ukraine, while largely asserting neutrality in the context of Gaza, and what makes such a stance problematic. By juxtaposing the cases of Ukraine and Palestine the article (developed within the MSCA project FESTWAR FM) offers contemporary insights into the role of film festivals in shaping cultural memory of war and adds to scholarly discussions on the silence around the Palestinian issue.