{"id":15958,"date":"2026-02-17T07:17:12","date_gmt":"2026-02-17T07:17:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/15958\/"},"modified":"2026-02-17T07:17:12","modified_gmt":"2026-02-17T07:17:12","slug":"berlin-film-festival-jury-president-wim-wenders-insists-the-role-of-artists-is-to-stay-out-of-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/15958\/","title":{"rendered":"Berlin film festival jury president Wim Wenders insists the role of artists is to \u201cstay out of politics\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

During the opening press conference at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale), festival jury president and veteran German filmmaker Wim Wenders shamefully declared the role of film artists was to \u201cstay out of politics.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wenders\u2019 extraordinary comment came in response to a journalist who asked why the festival had failed to express any solidarity with Palestinians suffering from Israel\u2019s genocidal onslaught in Gaza.<\/p>\n

Bae Doona, from left, and Jury president Wim Wenders attend the press conference for the Jury of the International Film Festival, Berlinale, in Berlin, Thursday, Feb. 12, 2026. [AP Photo\/Scott A Garfitt\/Invision]<\/p>\n

The exchange took place as follows. Initially, a member of the jury, Polish producer Ewa Puszczynska, speaking from the podium, declared that \u201ccinema had the power to change the world.\u201d Taking up this remark, a journalist from the political online interview show\u00a0Jung & Naiv\u00a0[Young & Na\u00efve] noted the festival did not take place in a vacuum and recalled that \u201cthe Berlinale as an institution has famously shown solidarity with people in Iran and Ukraine, but never with Palestine, even today.\u201d<\/p>\n

He continued: \u201cIn light of the German government\u2019s support of the genocide in Gaza and its role as the main funder of the Berlinale, do you as a member of the jury\u2026?\u201d<\/p>\n

At this point the livestream of the press conference was cut off before the journalist could finish his question, which was, however, captured by others filming the event. He concluded his question like this: \u201cDo you as a member of the jury support this selective treatment of human rights?\u201d<\/p>\n

In a statement, the festival press office declared the interruption, which included the question and the response by jury members, had occurred due to a technical fault. No one over the age of six is likely to believe that. A far more probable explanation is that a panicked editor pushed a button on hearing the words \u201cthe German government\u2019s support of the genocide in Gaza.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the uncut version of the press conference subsequently broadcast, US-born Berlinale director Tricia Tuttle was the first to respond to the journalist\u2019s question\u2014by attempting to close down any discussion, asserting that those on the platform wanted only to talk about films.<\/p>\n

Puszczynska (her productions include\u00a0The Zone of Interest) replied next, describing the journalist\u2019s question as \u201ca little bit unfair\u201d and very complicated given that \u201cthere are many wars with genocides.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tricia Tuttle at Berlinale 2026 [Photo by Elena Ternovaja \/ CC BY 3.0<\/a>]<\/p>\n

The last and most damaging word was left to jury president and veteran German filmmaker Wim Wenders, who declared bluntly: \u201cWe 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 to politics.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wenders\u2019 remark that artists are not obliged to take a position on a genocide which has now entered its third year is scandalous and must be firmly rebuffed.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Art is not an empty formal exercise separated from social life and politics, nor is it merely a form of personal self-expression. What role does Wenders, now an \u201cecumenical Christian filmmaker,\u201d attribute to art? According to critics, considering the \u201cinner life,\u201d exploring redemption, longing and the \u201cpresence of the unseen.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a 2018 interview, Wenders told the\u00a0Hollywood Reporter:<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery artist basically is the sum of his experiences. And spiritual experiences are very important. You can, of course, decide to live a life that is opposed to that. I was a radical student in 1968, and I turned away from my religious upbringing. I came back in a big way in the \u201980s and found that I hadn\u2019t really lost it. It was very much linked to the death of my father. Seeing him face death without fear, and actually with some anticipation and joy, was an incredible experience.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wenders has made valuable films in the past, but the conception he advanced in Berlin is both retrograde and utterly false. If art is to mean something important it cannot be indifferent to the upheavals of our day. What sort of art would it be that ignores the burning questions and convulsive events shaping and often devastating the lives of the planet\u2019s population? Those events, as Trotsky observed, are prepared by people and made by people, and fall upon and change people. \u201cArt, directly or indirectly, affects the lives of the people who make or experience the events. This refers to all art, to the grandest, as well as to the most intimate.\u201d<\/p>\n

Again, what would filmmakers who ignore mass murder in Gaza and the threat of dictatorship and world war truly have to say to anyone?<\/p>\n

Wenders\u2019 positions do not come out of the blue. In 2000, we\u00a0wrote,<\/a>\u00a0discussing some of his films:<\/p>\n

Compared with other figures of the New Cinema movement, for example R. W. Fassbinder or Volker Schl\u00f6ndorff, Wenders exhibits a tendency to pull back from difficult social and historical questions. Both Fassbinder (one of whose principal cinema influences was the German-American director Douglas Sirk) and Schl\u00f6ndorff have tackled head-on issues emanating from the German past and fascism in particular\u2026.<\/p>\n

In Wenders\u2019 own films the traces of the past remain either traces\u2014political slogans daubed on a wall in the background\u2014or assume an absurd form\u2014such as the Nazi war movie being rehearsed in Wings of Desire (1987). This is not to insist that every German filmmaker has to devote all of his work to making films devoted to the German past, but Wenders evinces a reluctance to really come to grips with the roots of the problems displayed by the figures in his films, loneliness, despair, disorientation.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, Wenders was not alone in this sort of \u201canti-political\u201d backlash, in reality, an accommodation to the official political and media barrage directed against opposition to the Gaza genocide and political and fascistic reaction generally. Actors Neil Patrick Harris and Michelle Yeoh offered similarly submissive comments in Berlin.<\/p>\n

Arundhati Roy [Photo by Vikramjit Kakati \/ CC BY 3.0<\/a>]<\/p>\n

One appropriate response to Wenders and the others came from Indian author Arundhati Roy, who issued a statement explaining she now planned to turn down an invitation to attend the festival due to her disgust at the comments made by jury members.<\/p>\n

Roy insisted angrily: \u201cTo 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\u2013when artists, writers and film-makers should be doing everything in their power to stop it.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Roy continued by noting that: \u201cAlthough 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

The opposition to the Israeli genocide, of course, is not confined to Germany. It has found expression in innumerable mass demonstrations, protests and strikes across the globe, including protests by significant numbers of prominent workers active in the film industry.<\/p>\n

In May 2025 more than\u00a0350 prominent directors, writers and actors<\/a>\u00a0signed an open letter denouncing the \u201cgenocide \u2026 taking place in Gaza\u201d and deplored the lack of action on the part of the film industry. Additional significant protests and demonstrations against the slaughter of civilians in Gaza took place at last year\u2019s film festivals in Cannes and\u00a0Venice<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The stance taken by Tuttle and Wenders reflects the political agenda of the German establishment, not the thinking of wide layers of the population.<\/p>\n

The festival is quite prepared to express political solidarity with nations and campaigns when it dovetails with the requirements of the festival\u2019s main financial sponsor, the German state.<\/p>\n

The journalist from the website\u00a0Jung & Naiv\u00a0was quite correct in pointing to the \u201cselective\u201d nature of the festival\u2019s expressions of solidarity.<\/p>\n

In 2023 the festival posted a statement prominently on its homepage headlined \u201cSolidarity with Ukraine and Iran.\u201d According to the statement: \u201cThe Berlinale staunchly condemns Russia\u2019s ongoing war of aggression, which violates international law, and expresses its solidarity with the people in Ukraine and all those who are campaigning against this war. The festival also stands with the courageous protesters in Iran as they defend themselves against a violent, undemocratic regime.\u201d<\/p>\n

The statement continued: \u201cThe film selection and various events\u2014in part with cooperation partners\u2014will focus on Iran and Ukraine.\u201d<\/p>\n

One year later the Berlinale management team led by Carlo Chatrian resigned in the wake of an all-party (Social Democrats, Christian Democrats, Green Party) campaign led by German Culture Minister Claudia Roth (Green Party). Roth and the rest denounced the festival jury as \u201cantisemitic\u201d for\u00a0awarding a prize<\/a>\u00a0to the Israeli-Palestinian film\u00a0No Other Land, which documents the crimes of the Israeli army and government against the Palestinian population in the West Bank.<\/p>\n

Tuttle, Chatrian\u2019s replacement, was then put through the wringer. Having declared she did not agree that No Other Land\u00a0and statements made by its co-directors during the 2025 Berlinale awards ceremony were antisemitic, she was denounced by the pro-Israeli organisation \u201cValues Initiative,\u201d which called for state funding of the festival to be halted. Also in response, the Berlin Senate<\/a>\u00a0announced that it would halve its subsidies to the festival.<\/p>\n

The pressure mounted on Tuttle by the German government and Israeli lobby explains, but does not excuse for a moment, her attempts to close down discussion on Israel\u2019s war crimes in Gaza.<\/p>\n

Sign up for the WSWS email newsletter<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"During the opening press conference at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale), festival jury president and veteran…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15959,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[99],"tags":[9618,112,761,8357,2246,11656,190,3126,4654],"class_list":{"0":"post-15958","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-berlin","8":"tag-arundhati-roy","9":"tag-berlin","10":"tag-berlinale","11":"tag-film-festival","12":"tag-gaza","13":"tag-genocide","14":"tag-germany","15":"tag-israel","16":"tag-wim-wenders"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15958","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15958"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15958\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15959"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}