Tilda Swinton, Be My Valentine

"The inhumane is being perpetrated on our watch," the actor said while being honored at the Berlin Film Festival.

By Audra Heinrichs | February 14, 2025 | 1:00pm

Photo: Screenshot Celebrities Entertainment

On Thursday, Tilda Swinton—once again—proved she’s perhaps got the best politics in Hollywood during a speech at Berlinale, the Berlin Film Festival.

While accepting the festival’s prestigious Golden Bear Award for lifetime achievement, Swinton took a needful—yet atypical—stance against “greed-addicted” governments and the man-made horrors of the world without once mentioning any of its current perpetrators by name.

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In praise of “the great independent state of cinema,” Swinton excoriated President Donald Trump, with a reference to his recent boasts that he’d bulldoze Gaza, by calling the film industry “an unlimited realm, innately inclusive, immune to efforts of occupation, colonization, takeover, ownership or the development of Riviera property.” It gets better.

She then took specific aim at the “entitled domination and the astonishing savagery of spite, state-perpetrated and internationally enabled mass murder…unacceptable to human society.”

“These are facts. They need to be faced. So for the sake of clarity, let’s name it. The inhumane is being perpetrated on our watch,” Swinton continued. “I’m here to name it without hesitation or doubt in my mind, and to lend my unwavering solidarity to all those who recognize the unacceptable complacency of our greed-addicted governments who make nice with planet wreckers and war criminals, wherever they come from.”

Not only is Swinton’s speech resonant as Trump, Elon Musk, et al. continue to take a wrecking ball to the country and the rest of the world, but it has particular poignance since the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement called for a boycott of the festival. On its website, BDS wrote that Berlinale is “complicit in the German government’s partnership in Israel’s genocide in Gaza and fails to protect filmmakers standing in solidarity with Palestinians.” The group, too, received a mention from Swinton during a press conference following her speech.

“I’m a great admirer of and have a great deal of respect for BDS and I think about it a lot,” she told reporters. “I decided it was more important for me to come. I was given a platform, which I decided in a personal moment was potentially more useful to all our causes than me not turning up. It was a judgment call that I take full responsibility for.”

This isn’t the first time Swinton has spoken out in protest of the genocide in Gaza. When pro-Palestine protesters interrupted a post-screening Q&A of Pedro Almodovar’s The Room Next Door at the New York Film Festival in October, Swinton vocalized support while on stage.

“These interruptions are uncomfortable, but they’re necessary, and it is relevant to our film. Syria is the room next door, Beirut, Gaza. Pedro’s film asks us not to look away,” Swinton said at the time.

I don’t take pleasure in lionizing the bare minimum from celebrities. However, given most of Hollywood has either never shown such public solidarity with Palestinians (and denounced state-sanctioned violence of any kind), or simply relied on a pin to speak for them, Swinton’s remarks are—sadly—quite unprecedented…even if they’re not all the way unprecedented for her.

Here’s hoping more of her peers soon follow suit.