With Germany rocked by revelations about the AfD, the Berlin film festival\u2019s excuse for inviting them never made sense<\/p>\n
When the Berlin international film festival\u2019s co-director Mariette Rissenbeek declared in an interview<\/a> last week that the festival doesn\u2019t strive to position itself politically, \u201cespecially in times when we don\u2019t know where politics are heading\u201d, I almost laughed at the sheer clumsiness. If only it wasn\u2019t so sad. Rissenbeek was reacting to the disclosure that politicians from the far-right Alternative f\u00fcr Deutschland (AfD) had been invited to the festival\u2019s opening gala<\/a> on 15 February, a decision that provoked an open letter of protest from 200 film-makers<\/a> and outrage on social media. The excuse that all the members of the Bundestag\u2019s culture committee are automatically invited to this state-funded event is one thing. But to declare the whole festival is apolitical in order to justify the decision is another.<\/p>\n For weeks, hundreds of thousands of people have been taking to the streets<\/a> of German cities protesting against the AfD, many of them demanding a a legal ban<\/a> on the party, following recent revelations that AfD figures held talks with other rightwing extremists about systematically deporting millions of people from Germany. Anyone perceived as being not \u201cGerman enough\u201d would be a target for \u201cremigration\u201d, according to the reported discussions: immigrants with and without a residence status, those and their descendants with German citizenship, allies who take a pro-migration stand.<\/p>\n Fatma Aydemir is a Guardian Europe columnist<\/p>\n Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters<\/a> section, please click here<\/a>.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" With Germany rocked by revelations about the AfD, the Berlin film festival\u2019s excuse for inviting them never made sense When the Berlin international film festival\u2019s co-director Mariette Rissenbeek declared in an interview last week that the festival doesn\u2019t strive to position itself politically, \u201cespecially in times when we don\u2019t know where politics are heading\u201d, I … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4474","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4474"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4474\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}