Many see that finesse as his legacy.
“Here is this guy whose father was a British military officer, who liberated Italy, his mother was Romanian from the Eastern bloc countries, his wife, German, and he was the neutral Swiss guy mediating between East and West,” Jungen said. “He was the right person to go behind the Wall. He was like a diplomat who knew how to talk to different people.”
Jungen views de Hadeln as a historical figure in the fall of Communism in Europe.
“Because of him, people for the very first time saw films from Soviet republics,” Jungen explained. “Today you can find everything on YouTube, but this was a period where you had to go to the movie theater and see a physical movie print being projected to know about the world.”
Under de Hadeln’s leadership, Speck helped start the Teddy Awards at the Berlinale in 1987, which Jungen described as the first recognition for gay filmmaking at A-list festivals.
“At that time, that was very controversial, and in Bonn, the capital of West Germany at that time, there were very conservative cultural ministers,” Jungen said. “This was a big fight. That’s another legacy of Moritz’s. He was a trailblazer for the L.G.B.T.Q. community and never really got credit for that.”
When he arrived in Venice in 2002, the maneuvering didn’t stop.
“At a very delicate juncture for the Venice Film Festival, after the Berlusconi government had removed Alberto Barbera from the directorship a year before the end of his term, Moritz was appointed to lead the festival,” Oscar Iarussi, the artistic director of the Bari International Film & TV Festival in Italy who still serves as an adviser to the Venice Film Festival, said on a call. “He set to work in a pragmatic manner. He was multilingual and free-spirited and had a truly European outlook.”
Iarussi offered an example of de Hadeln’s character at the time.
“He had been appointed by a center-right government, but he had ‘The Internationale,’ which is the workers’ anthem, set as his cellphone ringtone,” he said.
