The author Arundhati Roy has withdrawn from the Berlinale after the film festival’s chief juror said film-makers must stay out of politics.
The festival got off to a shaky start on Thursday after the competition jury, led by the German film-maker Wim Wenders, fielded questions about the conflict in Gaza. Asked if films can affect political change, Wenders said that “movies can change the world” but “not in a political way”.
He added that film-makers “have to stay out of politics because if we make movies that are dedicatedly political, we enter the field of politics. But we are the counterweight of politics, we are the opposite of politics. We have to do the work of people, not the work of politicians.”
In a statement on Friday announcing her withdrawal, Roy, who had been planning to attend a screening of her recently restored 1989 film In Which Annie Gives it Those Ones, called the comments “unconscionable” and feared they had reached “millions of people across the world”.
The Booker prize-winning Indian author said: “To hear them say that art should not be political is jaw-dropping. 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 film-makers should be doing everything in their power to stop it.”
She added: “Although I have been profoundly disturbed by the positions taken by the German government and various German cultural institutions on Palestine, I have always received political solidarity when I have spoken to German audiences about my views on the genocide in Gaza.”
Wenders is the serving president of this year’s Berlinale jury, which includes the American director-producer Reinaldo Marcus Green, the Japanese film-maker Hikari, the Nepalese director Min Bahadur Bham, the South Korean actor Bae Doona, the Indian director-producer Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, and Ewa Puszczyńska – who produced Oscar-winning film The Zone of Interest, about the idyllic home life of an Auschwitz commandant and his family.
The jury was questioned about the support the German government, which funds much of the festival, has shown for Israel. Puszczyńska called the question “complicated” and “a bit unfair”.
“Of course, we are trying to talk to people – every single viewer – to make them think, but we cannot be responsible for what their decision would be to support Israel or the decision to support Palestine,” she said. “There are many other wars where genocide is committed and we do not talk about that.”
Roy, who was this week longlisted for the Women’s prize for non-fiction for her first memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me, emphasised her belief that “what has happened in Gaza, what continues to happen, is a genocide of the Palestinian people by the state of Israel”.
She added: “It is supported and funded by the governments of the United States and Germany, as well as several other countries in Europe, which makes them complicit in the crime. If the greatest film-makers and artists of our time cannot stand up and say so, they should know that history will judge them. I am shocked and disgusted.”
Reflecting on her film being slated for inclusion in the festival’s Classics section, the author said there had been “something sweet and wonderful” about In Which Annie Gives It Those One, describing it as “a whimsical film that I wrote 38 years ago”.
