Berlin: Indian novelist Arundhati Roy announced on Friday she was pulling out of the Berlin Film Festival after the head of the festival jury said filmmakers should avoid overtly political films, agencies reported.
Roy, winner of the Booker Prize in 1997 for her novel “The God of Small Things”, said in a statement she was “shocked and disgusted” by the comments from jury members including German director Wim Wenders.
Asked on Thursday for his view on the German government’s position on Gaza, Wenders, who is head of this year’s seven-member international jury, said: “We have to stay out of politics because if we made movies that are dedicatedly political, we enter the field
of politics, but we are the counterweight to politics.”
“We have to do the work of people and not the work of politicians,” he said.
Polish film producer Ewa Puszczynska, another jury member, said it was “not fair” to ask the judges, as a body, about government positions on the Gaza war.
In a statement announcing her withdrawal — first given to Indian publication the Wire — Roy said that to “hear them say that art should not be political is jaw-dropping.”
She was quoted as saying “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 should be doing everything in their power to stop it.”
Roy had been due to present “In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones”, a 1989 film which she wrote, in the Berlinale’s Classics section. She said in her statement she would not be attending.
No comment was immediately available from the festival organizers.
Roy’s withdrawal from the festival is the latest mark of the bitter rifts across the world caused by the Gaza war.