Arundhati Roy withdraws from Berlin Film Festival over her ‘Stay away from politics’ comment | Berlin Film Festival

Writer Arundhati Roy has withdrawn from the Berlin Film Festival after the festival’s chief expert said filmmakers should stay out of politics.

The festival got off to a shaky start on Thursday after the competition’s jury, led by German director Wim Wenders, answered questions about the conflict in Gaza. Asked whether films could influence political change, Wenders said that “films can change the world” but “not in a political way.”

He added that filmmakers “have to stay away from politics because if we make ad hoc political films, we are entering the field of politics. But we are a counterweight to politics, we are the opposite of politics. We have to do the work of the people, not the work of politicians.”

In a statement issued Friday announcing her withdrawal, Roy, who was planning to attend a screening of her recently restored 1989 film In What Annie Gives it Those Ones, called the comments “unconscionable” and feared they would reach “millions of people around the world.”

The Booker Prize-winning Indian author said: “To hear them say that art should not be political is astonishing. It is a way of shutting down a conversation about a crime against humanity even as it unfolds before us in real time – when artists, writers and filmmakers must do everything in their power to stop it.”

She added: “Although I am deeply disturbed by the positions taken by the German government and various German cultural institutions on Palestine, I have always received political solidarity when I spoke to the German public about my views on the Gaza genocide.”

Wenders is the current president of this year’s Berlin jury, which includes American director and producer Reynaldo Marcus Green, Japanese director Hikari, Nepalese director Min Bahadur Bam, South Korean actor Bae Doona, Indian director and producer Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, and Ewa Buczynska – who produced the Oscar-winning film Zone of Interest, about the idyllic domestic life of one of the Auschwitz camps. The leader and his family.

The jury was questioned about the support provided to Israel by the German government, which funds a large part of the festival. Puszczyńska described the question as “complicated” and “a bit unfair.”

“Of course, we try to talk to people – every viewer – to make them think, but we cannot be responsible for their decision to support Israel or their decision to support Palestine,” she said. “There are many other wars in which genocide was committed and we do not talk about that.”

Roy, who was this week longlisted for the Women’s Non-Fiction Prize for her debut memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me, stressed her belief that “what happened in Gaza, and what continues to happen, is a genocide of the Palestinian people at the hands of the State of Israel.”

She added: “It is supported and funded by the governments of the United States and Germany, as well as many other countries in Europe, which makes it complicit in the crime. If the greatest filmmakers and artists of our time cannot stand up and say that, then they should know that history will judge them. I am shocked and disgusted.”

Reflecting on her film set to be included in the festival’s Classics section, the author said there was “something beautiful and wonderful” about “In What Annie Gives It That One,” describing it as “an eccentric film that I wrote 38 years ago.”