The debacle at this year’s Berlinale crystallizes a far deeper crisis in contemporary cultural institutions: an epistemological abdication disguised as neutrality. When Wim Wenders, serving as the festival’s jury president, intoned that filmmakers must “stay out of politics,” he did so not as an apolitical aesthete, but as a custodian of an ideologically saturated status quo that wants its cake of political quietude and the pleasure of moral legitimacy. (The Guardian)
The claim that cinema should be a “counterweight” to politics—rather than an active participant—reveals a profoundly impoverished understanding of both art and politics. It rests on a brittle distinction between the aesthetic and the political, one that collapses under historical scrutiny. The very idea of cinema as a medium distinct from political discourse is a luxury afforded only by those who have never had their bodies or communities consigned to zones of active imperial violence. (The Guardian)
Roy’s excoriation of this stance as “jaw-dropping” and “unconscionable” is not rhetorical hyperbole but a sober recognition that in a moment of documented war crimes and humanitarian catastrophe, silence is itself a political act. To insist that artists occupy some hermetically sealed realm of affective “empathy” but not political judgment is to re-erect the very walls that make meaningful dissent illegal, or at best, commodified. (The New Indian Express)
More insidious still is the implicit presumption underlying the festival’s response: that politics, if mentioned at all, must fit within a neoliberal script of benign disagreement—the kind of argument that refuses to call out structural violence or complicity by powerful states. In this schema, only certain political expressions are permissible: those that affirm existing power relations under the guise of universality. Anything that disrupts this equilibrium—especially critiques of European complicity in Middle Eastern violence—is greeted with what the jury terms “complexity.” (The New Indian Express)
This controversy therefore points to a troubling contradiction at the heart of much Western cultural elitism: it privileges the myth of art’s autonomous purity while simultaneously demanding that art perform as a safe, non-destabilizing emotional balm. The result? A sanitized cultural sphere that markets itself as progressive, yet systematically neuters the political potential of its own practitioners.
Roy’s withdrawal, then, is not a tantrum but a rebuttal to a long tradition—dating from aesthetic formalism to neoliberal multiculturalism—that seeks to confine the intellectual and moral life of artists within a cage labeled “politics: optional.”In doing so, Berlinale inadvertently exposed a truth it may not have intended: that claiming neutrality is itself a political position—one aligned with the very powers whose conduct the artists are being asked to ignore. (The Guardian)
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