Award-winning Indian novelist Arundhati Roy pulls out of the Berlin Film Festival over jury comments

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.

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.

Roy described the comments as "unconscionable". "To hear them say that art should not be political is jaw-dropping," she said in a statement published in the Indian journal The Wire.

"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," she said.

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.

Considered more politically minded than its counterparts in Venice and Cannes, the festival has been repeatedly criticised by pro-Palestinian activists for not taking an overt stance on Gaza, in contrast to the war in Ukraine and the situation in Iran, where thousands of anti-government protesters have been reported killed by security forces.

Hamas carried out a cross-border raid into southern Israel on October 7, 2023, triggering a devastating Israeli campaign in the Gaza Strip that has killed more than 70,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health officials. Hamas militants killed 1,200 people and took 251 hostages in the October 7 attack, according to Israeli tallies.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and senior Hamas leader Ibrahim Al-Masri have both been issued arrest warrants by the International Criminal Court on charges including crimes against humanity, which Israel denies.

-James Mackenzie/Reuters