Receiving a Golden Bear for lifetime achievement at the Berlin Berlinale, the actor Tilda Swinton delivered a searing rebuke of global leadership during her acceptance. Without naming names, she condemned what she called “the astonishing savagery of spite, state-perpetrated and internationally enabled mass murder,” in the process casting a stark light on what she sees as the moral abdication of world governments—driven, she argued, by greed and complicity. “These are facts. They need to be faced,” she told the assembled audience. “The inhumane is being perpetrated on our watch. I’m here to name it without hesitation or doubt in my mind, and to lend my unwavering solidarity to all those who recognise the unacceptable complacency of our greed-addicted governments who make nice with planet wreckers and war criminals, wherever they come from.”

Here is Swinton’s speech in full:

Dear Fellow Humans,

Here’s one of the best things that can happen to a young person curious for the world and how to live a life in it

They can find themselves here
At the Berlinale

When I first came to this festival
I was 25 and looking for my life
Looking for the world
And signs of human life here
How I might take my place among it
On the hunt for amazement – for solidarity, and connection

And I can say I found it all right here in one fell swoop

And I’ve never been without it since

Forty years of the comradeship – and friendship – of filmmakers from around the planet
The faithful community of a global cinema audience
And – above all – the boundaryless possibilities of filmmaking itself and all the fun of the fair to be had there

When you honour me, you honour all the above

But
I make films as a film fan first and foremost

Here’s why – and what never changes :
And what, over the next ten days, you will have spread before you, a feast for the heart, a tonic for the soul:

The dark
The quietness
The liberty of sound
The uninterrupted voice
The open invitation to reverie
Being amongst a whole mess of humanity and trusting that you might actually feel the same as each other for even an instant
The leap of faith
The smoke and mirrors
The beam of light

And, since this matters too,
The lifelong friendships struck up in screenings and breakfast buffets and nightclubs, coffee queues and on street corners

And through them

The growing possibility of seeing more than one side of things
The sensation of feeling yourself change :
Feeling yourself challenged, tested, feeling yourself safer, braver,
Taking your values between finger and thumb and examining them there, recognitions and wheels turning underwater and deep bells ringing

Because there’s:

The magic of detail suspended in space available to all humans
The miracle of timelessness available to all humans
The unbeatable beauty of the Earth
The actual value of spoken language
The actual value of unspoken language
The grace and power of the unwatched face
The vulnerability and valiance of human life being lived – always and everywhere and everywhen

The downright usefulness of the wide, wild screen –
And so, so, so, so, so, so many films

In 1986, we used to traipse snow on our boots into the Zoopalast
Werner Schroeter was showing Der Rosenkönig at the Delphi
And the Teddies were inaugurated

A wall was still up, we used to make it our business to mission over to the East in search of rare vinyl and a wider view but
Our minds were focused on that boundarylessness in here

We liked to think we dignified the cinema we made with our dissidence, our resistance and our determination to find a communion to have faith in

Here’s what occurred to us back then:

We can do better as human beings – nothing surer –
and on our way, we can do worse than foraging in the cinema – in art – for the breadcrumbs through the forest to understand exactly how

Now, as then,
In a present when it has perhaps never been more pressing to consider – to weigh with reference and maturity – what sovereignty means to humans

What history and legacy and an evolved culture might be worth to our sense of ourselves

And even what being human means – and is worth – at all

We can head for the great Independent State of Cinema and rest there:

An unlimited realm, innately inclusive, immune to efforts of occupation, colonisation, take over, ownership or the development of riviera property
borderless and with no policy of exclusion, persecution or deportation.

No known address. No visa required.

It’s so very, very good for us to wonder at the world
And to be surprised by admiration for each other
Rather than shocked speechless by our cavalier mean spiritedness and cruelty
To notice our myriad variations and unite in celebrating them
Rather than resign ourselves to a submission to entitled domination and the astonishing savagery of spite

State perpetrated and internationally enabled mass murder is
Currently actively terrorising more than one part of our world
Currently condemned by the very bodies specifically set up by humans to monitor things on Earth 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

I’m here to name it
Without hesitation or doubt in my mind

And to lend my unwavering solidarity to all those who recognise the unacceptable complacency of our greed-addicted governments who make nice with planet-wreckers and war criminals
Wherever they come from

I am also here to name my absolute personal faith in culture in resistance

An enlightened cinema can inspire a civilised world
Can lend us the pause, the breath, the reflection that might embolden us
To take the best part of ourselves: that capacity for enchantment and openness
For wit and intrigue
that admiration for human flexibility and resource –
Our capacity to survive things
For thrill and sensation that we find in the witness that cinema represents
And build on it out in the open and under the sky – IRL

So, when the chips are down – as might be interpreted at this point in history with particular sharpness – and at any age and stage of our lives, not only the 25 year olds

And with the settled acknowledgement that being FOR something does not, EVER, imply being ANTI anyONE –
That being FOR humane solidarity means FOR humane solidarity with ALL humans so invested in common decency and fair representation
(And) in the agreement that freedom in the naming of repressive, inhumane and criminal movements – wherever and whenever – is amongst our essential human rights and deserves our honour and our loyalty

On the path to believing – against all odds – in the practical feasability of fairness on earth
To building brave faith in – and voting for – reliable human accord and in an inviolable respect among us all – without exception – for difference and dignity –

Maybe: humans, friends,

Trust in cinema?

Support big screens wherever we find them?

Watch everything there?

Hold the streaming services to their proud claim to be big-cinema supportive and encourage them to spend a large chunk of their squillions on building, renovating and enlivening cinema theatres in every territory they reach?

Encourage the curious and fearless distributors and exhibitors among us by buying ticket after ticket and making it work for them to keep us nourished and inspired with a broad and dynamic cinema ad infinitum

Treasure the 14 decades of archive film available to us – invaluable traces of our human society and spirit without which our human future – not to say the future of cinema – would be immeasurably the poorer?

Embolden a vibrant and responsive internationalist cinema culture for the young
and
Find a film festival – maybe, better still, FOUND one

In villages and the centres of big cities
In refugee camps and schools and care homes
On wheels up hills and inflatable rafts in the ocean

Warum denn nicht?

The more the merrier

And size isn’t everything

Its all to play for

Ich bin ganz ganz stolz hier zu sein im diesem ort mit alle euch
Hier war ein zu hause fur mich damals

Thank you, dear Berlinale, for laying out my life’s magic box of faith
For all the friends I have found here
For forty years of parties and revelations
And for my beautiful shiny bear

Long live cinema
And all its neverending promise: a light in the dark that never goes out

Let’s keep looking up

With all my love

Tilda