After an online-only edition in 2021, this year’s Berlin International Film Festival kicked off on February 10 and, for the first time since 1992, I chose not to attend. The first weeks of the year had seen Omicron case numbers surging wildly across Europe; exactly a month before the event began, Germany hit a daily record of 80,000 new cases. To insist on staging it as an in-person event seemed to me both reckless and tone-deaf – and to then refuse any provisions for online screenings, on top of that, just felt arrogant.