It’s a tired script. You’ve seen it before, usually played out in the sanitized boardrooms of Silicon Valley or the echo chambers of X, but this time the stage is the Berlinale. The setting is Berlin, a city that loves to wear its historical trauma like a designer accessory, provided that trauma fits the current government-approved vibe.

Arundhati Roy just walked. The Booker Prize winner and perennial thorn in the side of the establishment isn’t interested in the "neutrality" being peddled at the Berlin Film Festival. She’s out. The catalyst was a German filmmaker—the kind of guy who probably thinks a camera is just a lens and not a weapon—suggesting that cinema should "stay out of politics" regarding the ongoing horror in Gaza.

It’s a laughable proposition. It’s the kind of thing you say when your biggest professional risk is a bad review in Variety, rather than a drone strike or a state-sponsored disappearance. To suggest that a festival founded in 1951 as a "showcase of the free world" during the Cold War should suddenly become a vacuum is worse than naive. It’s dishonest.

Roy doesn't do vacuums. Since The God of Small Things, she’s spent her career proving that every choice—what you write, where you stand, who you ignore—is a political act. For her, the festival’s attempt to play both sides isn't just cowardice. It’s an insult to the medium.

The friction here isn't just about hurt feelings or a messy press conference. It’s about the money. The Berlinale gets a massive chunk of its €12.9 million budget from the German government. In Germany right now, the term "Staatsräson"—reason of state—is being used to draw a very hard line around what can and cannot be said about Israel and Palestine. If you’re a cultural institution, you play by those rules or you watch your funding evaporate. The trade-off is simple: silence for solvency.

We see this same rot in tech. We see it when platforms "moderate" content to appease authoritarian markets while claiming they’re just neutral pipes for information. It’s the same lie. When a filmmaker stands up in Berlin and says art should be a "bridge" instead of a "battleground," what they’re really saying is that they don’t want their premiere ruined by the reality of the outside world. They want the red carpet to be a safe space for people in expensive suits to feel important.

But the world isn't a safe space. It’s a mess of blood, bad decisions, and systemic failure.

Roy’s exit is a middle finger to the idea that we can compartmentalize our ethics. She’s calling out the hypocrisy of a festival that happily screens "political" documentaries about safe, historical villains while clutching its pearls when the villains are still in power and holding the purse strings. You can’t claim to celebrate the "human spirit" on screen while ignoring the literal crushing of humans off-screen.

The filmmaker in question—let’s call him a representative of the "Can’t We All Just Get Along?" school of mediocrity—wants cinema to be a refuge. That’s a luxury. It’s a luxury for people who aren't being bombed, displaced, or silenced. For Roy, and for anyone paying attention, cinema is only useful if it’s honest. And honesty in 2024 is rarely "neutral."

This is the state of the modern cultural industry. It’s a series of high-stakes negotiations where the price of entry is your spine. We’ve seen it with actors losing roles for social media posts. We’ve seen it with journalists being sidelined for using the "wrong" vocabulary. The Berlinale is just the latest venue for this particular brand of theater.

The festival organizers are likely terrified. They have a brand to protect, sponsors to please, and a government to keep happy. They want the glamour without the grit. They want the prestige of having an intellectual heavyweight like Roy on the guest list without the inconvenience of her actually having something to say.

Roy’s departure isn't just a PR headache for Berlin. It’s a reminder that "staying out of politics" is, in itself, a very specific, very loud political statement. It’s a vote for the status quo. It’s a vote for the people who pay the bills.

So, the festival continues. The movies will play. The champagne will be poured. The "neutral" directors will talk about "universal themes" while the world burns just outside the frame. They’ll keep their funding, and they’ll keep their standing in the polite society of the European arts scene.

But you have to wonder: what’s the point of a film festival that’s afraid of a movie’s shadow?