As someone who has spent a lot of time thinking about the celebrated German director’s work, this statement—from a press conference on 12 February, at the opening of the 2026 Berlin International Film Festival or Berlinale, for which Wenders is serving as jury president—did not surprise me. Wenders isn’t known for taking controversial stands and has largely avoided topical content in his films.
But the statement certainly disappointed me.
Wenders could have made a significant impact by speaking out about the awful conditions that the people of Gaza have been suffering through or the “separate-but-equal” inequality that all Palestinians must contend with. As an elder statesman in the German film industry, he would have been spared some of the hostility directed at less celebrated artists who have advocated for Gaza and the West Bank.
Mind you, it still wouldn’t have been easy for Wenders to navigate the aftermath of such outspokenness.
For obvious reasons, Germans have long been reluctant to criticise Israel. But that reluctance turned into something worse after the IDF invaded Gaza in retaliation for the savage attack Hamas launched on 7 October 2023.
Although an Israeli response was inevitable and surely part of the planning Hamas had made beforehand, it rapidly escalated from a focused operation into an all-out war that harmed innocent lives throughout Gaza, leading to casualty figures far exceeding what Israel had suffered and the wholesale destruction of the densely populated territory’s infrastructure. Finding food, water, and a safe place to sleep is a herculean task.
As of this article’s writing, official estimates agreed by both Gaza health authorities and the Israel Defence Forces count 70,000 dead. But think tanks and researchers argue that these numbers could rise to as high as 200,000 once the rubble has been cleared, as the territory’s population has been reduced by 10%.
While other countries in Western Europe eventually began to push back against Israel’s quest for disproportionate vengeance, the German government stood firm in its support for the IDF’s actions. People who protested against the war, even prominent intellectuals, were branded Antisemites. In this environment, simply calling for peace was risky.
Because of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and wars with its neighbours, Israel has been excluded from supranational bodies in the Middle East. Over time, it has been grouped with Europe instead. Think Eurovision, for example, and its Association Agreement with the European Union. Whether in sport, entertainment, or education, Israel has been treated almost as an expatriate state.
When you couple this dual identity—geographically Middle Eastern, affectively European—with German paranoia about being labelled Antisemites, it’s easy to understand why the Berlinale would prefer to direct attention away from Israel’s actions in Gaza and its mistreatment of the Palestinian people more generally.
After studying the entire press conference, I don’t get the impression that Wenders was doing this consciously.
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen followed the lead of others who had critiqued Wenders’ position, sharing the statement along with a quote from the 1992 book The Logic of Images, in which the director argues that “every film is political. Most political of all are those that pretend not to be”.
Instead of treating the juxtaposition of these quotes as self-evident hypocrisy, Nguyen took the time to examine them in greater depth, underscoring the term’s slipperiness:
From this, all I can guess is that Wenders is opposed to the IMPLICIT political content of mainstream entertainment, which can normalise the atrocious. These are the ‘most political’ films. And he is also at least sometimes opposed to the EXPLICIT politics of “political” movies, when they are badly done.
Make of this fragment what you will. He’s not enthused about bad political movies (because they endorse bad politics or because they are bad aesthetically), which I agree with. But he doesn’t give much of a clue as to what is a good political movie, and yet they must exist, as “every film is political”.
In other words, all films are political, whether they realise it or not, in a sense that aligns with what cultural critic Frederic Jameson’s concept of the “political unconscious”. But some films are also self-consciously political, which is a different thing altogether.
How would Wenders have responded to a follow-up question about these two definitions of the “political”?
It’s important to note that his statement that what filmmakers do is the “opposite of politics” was not preemptive. He offered it in support of his fellow juror Ewa Puszczyńska.
The Polish producer was responding to a long question that put the entire panel on the spot:
“This festival does not happen in a vacuum. The Berlinale as an institution has famously shown solidarity with the people in Iran and Ukraine, but never with Palestine, even today. So my question is, in light of the German government’s support of the genocide in Gaza, and its role as the main funder of the Berlinale, do you, as a member of the jury, support this selective treatment of human rights?”
Noting that she thought the question “unfair,” Puszczyńska was clearly struggling with the multiple possible interpretations of the term “political”.
She explained that she voted and marched in her native Poland in accordance with her political convictions, implying that the goal of cinema should be to prepare people to make more informed decisions, not to decide for them. “It’s about empathy. It’s about trying to understand. It’s about making your own mind.”
This narrow definition of politics runs counter to the dominant trends of the past half-century, which have moved toward Wenders’ formulation in The Logic of Images, insisting that, deep down, everything is political.
Although the distinction Puszczyńska wanted to make is semantically defensible, in this instance, it feels like a cop out.
As Nguyen argued in his post, “if someone were to ask Wenders about the Holocaust, he’d probably have an opinion, as would anyone at the Berlinale. So why can’t someone be expected to have an opinion about the genocide going on right now in Gaza?”
Even if this double standard is mandated from above, by European governments trying desperately to beat back the return of fascism, it’s a little too convenient for artists like Wenders and Puszczyńska to accept without question.
Earlier in the Berlinale press conference, when asked what he loves about cinema, Wenders singled out its capacity for exposing audiences to the lives of others, making it possible for them to be “thrown into another universe”.
He made a lovely case for this being thrown, stating that it’s “a great experience, to get out of your own and be in somebody else’s world. And sometimes even feel very comfortable there and discover things. There’s nothing more beautiful.”
The problem with this optimistic formulation is that far too many people around the world live in circumstances where ugliness predominates, perhaps nowhere more intensely than in the horrorscape left behind by the war in Gaza.
It’s no accident that Israel severely restricted access to the beleaguered territory, rightly concluding that the world would be more likely to tolerate the destruction wreaked by the IDF if people were denied the opportunity to see it properly.
It’s not wrong to advocate for culture that lets people make up their own minds. But when overwhelming pressure in a society is directed towards reaching one conclusion and against another, as is surely the case in Germany when the conflict between Israel and Palestine is discussed, artists committed to opening minds should exert themselves to counteract that pressure.
Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
