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Award-winning writer Arundhati Roy said Friday (February 13, 2026) she was withdrawing from the Berlin Film Festival implicit assemblage president Wim Wenders’ comments that helium wanted to “stay retired of politics” aft being asked astir Gaza.
Ms. Roy said successful a connection sent to AFP that she was “shocked and disgusted” by Mr. Wenders’ effect to a question connected Gaza astatine a property league connected Thursday (February 12, 2026). “With heavy regret, I indispensable accidental that I volition not beryllium attending the Berlinale,” she said.
Ms. Roy, whose caller “The God of Small Things” won the 1997 Booker Prize, had been announced arsenic a festival impermanent to contiguous a restored mentation of the 1989 movie “In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones”, successful which she starred and wrote the screenplay.
However, she said that the “unconscionable” statements by Mr. Wenders and different assemblage members had led her to reconsider.
“To perceive them accidental that creation should not beryllium governmental is jaw-dropping,” she said.
When asked astir Germany’s enactment for Israel astatine the property league connected Thursday (February 12, 2026), Mr. Wenders said, “We cannot truly participate the tract of politics,” describing filmmakers arsenic “the counterweight to politics”.
In her statement, Ms. Roy described Israel’s actions successful Gaza arsenic “a genocide of the Palestinian radical by the State of Israel”.
“If the top filmmakers and artists of our clip cannot basal up and accidental so, they should cognize that past volition justice them,” she said.
