Arundhati Roy quits Berlin film festival over ‘stay out of politics’ comment | Berlin film festival
Writer Arundhati Roy withdrew from the Berlinale after the film festival’s chief jury said filmmakers should stay away from politics.
The festival got off to a shaky start on Thursday when the competition jury, led by German filmmaker Wim Wenders, asked questions about the conflict in Gaza. When asked if movies could affect political change, Wenders said that “movies can change the world” but “not politically.”
Filmmakers “need to stay out of politics, because if we make especially political films, we enter the domain of politics. But we are the balancing weight of politics, the exact opposite of politics. We should do the people’s job, not the politicians’ job.”
In a statement announcing his withdrawal on Friday, Roy, who had planned to attend a screening of the recently restored 1989 film In Where Annie Gives it Those Ones, said the comments were “unreasonable” and feared they had reached “millions of people around the world.”
The Booker Prize-winning Indian author said: “It’s jaw-dropping to hear them say that art shouldn’t be political. It’s a way of shutting down the conversation about a crime against humanity even as it’s unfolding before us in real time – when artists, writers and filmmakers should be doing everything they can to stop it.”
He added: “While I am deeply disturbed by the attitudes of the German government and various German cultural institutions regarding Palestine, I have always been met with political solidarity when speaking to German audiences about my views on the genocide in Gaza.”
Wenders is the incumbent president of this year’s Berlinale jury; This jury includes American director-producer Reinaldo Marcus Green, Japanese filmmaker Hikari, Nepalese director Min Bahadur Bham, South Korean actor Bae Doona, Indian director-producer Shivendra Singh Dungarpur and Ewa Puszczyńska, who produced the Oscar-winning The Zone of Interest, about the idyllic home life of an Auschwitz commander and his life. family.
The jury was questioned about the German government’s support for Israel, which finances much of the festival. Puszczyńska described the question as “complicated” and “a bit unfair”.
“Of course we try to talk to people, to every single audience, to make them think, but we can’t be responsible for what their decision to support Israel is or what their decision to support Palestine is going to be,” he said. “There are many other wars where genocide was committed, and we don’t talk about it.”
Roy, who was nominated for the Women’s Prize for Fiction this week for her first memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me, emphasized her belief that “what is happening in Gaza is a genocide of the Palestinian people by the state of Israel.”
He added: “It is supported and financed by the governments of the United States and Germany, as well as many other countries in Europe, making them complicit. If the greatest filmmakers and artists of our time cannot stand up and say so, they should know that history will judge them. I am shocked and disgusted.”
Stating that his film is planned to be included in the Classics section of the festival, the author said that there is “something sweet and wonderful” in In Where Annie Gives It That One and described the film as “a strange film that I wrote 38 years ago.”
