Todd Haynes at Lumière Festival: 'It is a time to remember how important it is to protect our freedoms'

It's distressing when you see the sort of conglomerate, conglomerization of huge media organizations that one might imagine would provide enough revenue and foundation for risk-taking to still occur. But sadly, that is rarely what you end up seeing. There does seem to be a certain discourse that is threatened at the moment, and we saw it this year at the beginning of the year at the Berlinale with everything that happened with Tricia Tuttle. And I don't know, did you see that cultural institutions are becoming potentially more and more threatened by political pressure? Do you see that, what happened at the Berlinale happening again? Well, yeah, I mean, I think Germany has a unique and specific series of, and at times contradictory, attitudes or laws even, around how we discuss Israel, for instance. And there's this happening on the one hand where speech is kind of being watchdog perhaps and limited and people have a hard time just saying, you know, it doesn't have to be about Jewish people to have problems with the policies of Netanyahu or whoever it may be. So Germany is a unique case, but I think we're feeling similar things about a crackdown on content and what is called ideology or point of view in the United States. And it's targeted at the media, and it's targeted at the news industries, and it's targeted at universities. So it is a time to remember how important it is to protect our freedoms and our ability to speak freely.