BERLIN: Award-winning Indian writer Arundhati Roy said Friday she was withdrawing from the Berlin Film Festival over jury president Wim Wenders&#39;s comments that he wanted to &quot;stay out of politics&quot; after being asked about Gaza. Roy said in a statement sent to AFP that she was &quot;shocked and disgusted&quot; by Wenders&#39; response to a question on Gaza at a press conference on Thursday. &quot;With deep regret, I must say that I will not be attending the Berlinale,&quot; she said. Roy, whose novel &quot;Children of a Lesser God&quot; won the 1997 Booker Prize, had been announced as a festival guest to present a restored version of the 1989 film &quot;In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones&quot;, in which she starred and wrote the screenplay. However, she said that the &quot;unconscionable&quot; statements by Wenders and other jury members had led her to reconsider.&quot;To hear them say that art should not be political is jaw-dropping,&quot; she said. When asked about Germany&#39;s support for Israel at the press conference on Thursday, Wenders said: &quot;We cannot really enter the field of politics&quot;, describing filmmakers as &quot;the counterweight to politics&quot;. In her statement Roy, described Israel&#39;s actions in Gaza as &quot;a genocide of the Palestinian people by the State of Israel&quot;. &quot;If the greatest film makers and artists of our time cannot stand up and say so, they should know that history will judge them,&quot; she said.

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Award-winning Indian writer Arundhati Roy withdrew from the Berlin Film Festival, condemning jury president Wim Wenders’s apolitical stance and calling Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide.

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

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