Wim Wenders has returned to the comments that caused such a commotion at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year.
Speaking at the Venice Film Festival press conference today for new movie From inside out – The architecture of Peter Zumthor, the veteran German filmmaker was asked about his comment suggesting that filmmakers should stay out of politics.
“I could repeat the same thing I said then. I could be more explicit,” said Wenders today. “What I said then is that filmmakers, we are the opposite of politicians. We have empathy. Politics works without empathy. That’s all I said.”
”We have a very different thing,” Wenders responded to the Guardian’s question at the presser. ”We are not working with the mindset of politicians. We are working with the mindset of empathetic people, and we are into changing things. Politics are into confirming what is, and that’s what I said, and it was quoted as ‘we have to stay out of politics’, which was clearly not what I said because it’s not what I said now, and I said the same thing then.”
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He continued: ”The frame of filmmakers is a different mindset than the mindset of politicians, and we should not work with their mindset. We work with a different set of rules. I say that again, and I hope you’re not misquoting me, and saying ‘we have to stay out of politics’ because we do the opposite. We are the antidote.”
In Berlin, the filmmaker had said at the film’s jury press conference: “We 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 of politics, we are the opposite of politics. We have to do the work of people, not the work of politicians.”
The comments unleashed a media storm at the highly political event, taking place against the backdrop of the ongoing war in Gaza, and led to the festival having to issue multiple statements about the highly charged press conferences that followed. Author Arundhati Roy even pulled out of the festival in protest.
