Tilda Swinton mocks Donald Trump’s plans to turn Gaza into ‘Riviera property’

The British actor was accepting an honorary Golden Bear for career achievement from the Berlin Film Festival

Tilda Swinton mocked Donald Trump’s plans to transform Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East” during a impassioned, tearful speech at the Berlin Film Festival.

The British actor, 64, was accepting an honorary Golden Bear for career achievement.

During her remarks, she praised the festival as “a borderless realm and with no policy of exclusion, persecution or deportation.”

The Oscar-winning Michael Clayton star went on to describe the “great independent state of cinema” as “innately inclusive — immune to efforts of occupation, colonization, takeover, ownership or the development of riviera property.”

Last week, President Trump left Republicans and Democrats divided after announcing his brazen plan to “take over” the Gaza Strip and transform it from a “hell hole” to the “Riviera of the Middle East”.

Swinton continued: “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 recognize the unacceptable complacency of our greed-addicted governments who make nice with planet-wreckers and war criminals, wherever they come from.”

Tilda Swinton clutches her Honorary Bear for career achievement during the opening ceremony of the 2025 Berlinale (AFP via Getty Images)

Swinton most recently appeared in Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door. In a two-star review for The Independent, Adam White described the film as “didactic, strained and unsure of itself” but praised Swinton, writing: “Swinton is sensitive, fragile but wise, in a performance that matches the quiet normalcy of her work in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s enigmatic 2021 drama Memoria.

“It’s particularly lovely to see her in this sort of mode, which has become rare – it’s as if she parcels out one human being for every six or seven oddballs these days.”

Earlier this year, The Independent ranked Swinton as the 20th greatest film actor of the 21st century.

“Swinton is one of cinema’s great chameleons, as believable when playing a mother with a slowly dawning horror about her impossible-to-reach child in We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) as she is the besotted elderly dowager Madame D in The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014),” wrote Chris Harvey.

“It might be easy perhaps to associate her regal poise with being the daughter of a Scottish noble, yet she sometimes conveys almost unfathomable depths beneath the porcelain-cool exterior that she presents to the cameras.

“There’s heat and emotion there, too, as in the portrait of an attorney who sanctions a cover-up killing in Michael Clayton (2007) – for which she won an Oscar, opposite George Clooney. Swinton is a risk-taking actor who almost never disappoints.”