Indian writer Roy pulls out of Berlin Film Festival over Gaza row

Award-winning Indian writer Arundhati Roy says she is withdrawing from the Berlin Film Festival over jury president Wim Wenders’s comments that cinema should “stay out of politics” when he was asked about Gaza.

Roy says in a statement sent to AFP that she is “shocked and disgusted” by Wenders’s response to a question about the Palestinian territory at a press conference on Thursday.

Roy, whose novel “The God of Small Things” won the 1997 Booker Prize, had been announced as a festival guest to present a restored version of the 1989 film “In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones,” in which she starred and wrote the screenplay.

However, she says that the “unconscionable” statements by Wenders and other jury members had led her to reconsider, “with deep regret.”

When asked about Germany’s support for Israel at a press conference on Thursday, Wenders said: “We cannot really enter the field of politics,” describing filmmakers as “the counterweight to politics.”

Fellow jury member Ewa Puszczynska said it was a “little bit unfair” to expect the jury to take a direct stance on the issue.

Roy said in her statement that “to hear them say that art should not be political is jaw-dropping.”

She describes Israel’s actions in Gaza as “a genocide of the Palestinian people by the State of Israel.”

“If the greatest filmmakers and artists of our time cannot stand up and say so, they should know that history will judge them,” she says.

Roy is one of India’s most famous living authors and is a trenchant critic of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, as well as a firm supporter of the Palestinian cause.