{"id":290353,"date":"2026-02-14T03:23:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-14T03:23:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/290353\/"},"modified":"2026-02-14T03:23:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-14T03:23:08","slug":"arundhati-roy-is-right-not-wim-wenders-here-are-eight-films-that-have-changed-politics-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/290353\/","title":{"rendered":"Arundhati Roy is right, not Wim Wenders \u2013 here are eight films that have changed politics | Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Should film festivals be more than just screenings and red carpets? Should they prompt us to think about the role cinema plays in the world? Novelist Arundhati Roy certainly thinks so. She pulled out of the jury at the Berlin festival<\/a> in protest at jury president Wim Wenders\u2019 claim that films should \u201cstay out of politics\u201d<\/a>; she said Wenders\u2019 stance was \u201cunconscionable\u201d, and that to \u201chear [him] say that art should not be political is jaw-dropping.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wim Wenders, president of the jury of the Berlin film festival. Photograph: Axel Schmidt\/Reuters<\/p>\n

Wenders had suggested that cinema is a way to build empathy, but not directly change politicians\u2019 minds. However this is simply not true. Some films \u2013 both documentary and narrative \u2013 have not only changed public opinion about social issues but led directly to legislation. Despite evidence to the contrary, politicians are people too. They can be moved. And sometimes they are even moved to action.<\/p>\n

Sebasti\u00e1n Lelio\u2019s 2017 drama about a transgender woman fighting to be accepted by her dead partner\u2019s family was a huge success internationally, winning the best foreign language film Oscar. But it was in Chile, where it was filmed and set, that it had the biggest impact. Lelio was invited to the presidential palace by Chile\u2019s then-president Michelle Bachelet, who tweeted<\/a>: \u201cIt was an honor to have the team of A Fantastic Woman here in La Moneda, the people\u2019s house.\u201d The film helped change the political climate in Chile and led to the passing of its gender identity law<\/a>, which had been stuck in congress for five years.<\/p>\n

Daniela Vega in A Fantastic Woman. Photograph: Sony Pictures Classics\/Allstar<\/p>\n

In 2016, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy won her second Oscar for A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness, a short documentary about \u201chonour\u201d killings in Pakistan. In her acceptance speech<\/a>, she said: \u201cThis week, the Pakistani prime minister has said that he will change the law on \u2018honour\u2019 killing after watching this film. That is the power of film.\u201d The Pakistani government passed a law<\/a> legislating stricter punishments for such murders and closing legal loopholes that enabled killers to escape punishment by obtaining forgiveness from family members.<\/p>\n

Film-makers Shara Amin and Nabaz Ahmed spent 10 years on the roads in Kurdistan speaking to women and men<\/a> about the impact of female genital mutilation. The resulting documentary had a profound effect on lawmakers, and in 2011, the Kurdistan parliament passed a bill outlawing the practice<\/a>. \u201cShowing the film in parliament was a great breakthrough for us,\u201d Ahmed told the Guardian<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou don\u2019t care. You only pretend to care.\u201d Perhaps the BBC\u2019s most famous television play, Ken Loach\u2019s 1966 TV film about a woman\u2019s descent into poverty challenged the nation\u2019s views on homelessness. The film had an undeniable impact, though its influence was slower than many realise. There were some immediate results: the film led to the creation of the homelessness charity Crisis<\/a> just a few months after its broadcast. But it wasn\u2019t until 1977 that the Housing (Homeless Persons) Act was passed, stipulating that homeless families like Cathy\u2019s had a right to be rehoused by the council.<\/p>\n

Shaun Dooley in Mr Bates vs the Post Office. Photograph: ITV\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n

Despite people campaigning for years for justice following the Post Office Horizon scandal, it took the broadcast of a four-part ITV drama to get politicians to finally act<\/a>. But act they did, by passing the Post Office (Horizon System) Compensation Act 2024 and Post Office (Horizon System) Offences Act 2024. Though not a cinematic release, Mr Bates is a clear example of powerful onscreen storytelling exposing injustice and applying pressure to enact change.<\/p>\n

Silenced<\/p>\n

Before creating Squid Game, Hwang Dong-hyuk<\/a> directed the 2011 drama Silenced, about the sexual abuse of deaf children at Gwangju Inhwa school in South Korea. The film depicts not only the crimes but also the inadequate justice that followed, sparking public outrage. The Korean National Assembly passed the \u201cDogani law\u201d (named after the Korean title of the film), which scrapped the statute of limitations for sexual crimes against children under 13 and disabled people.<\/p>\n

The Day After<\/p>\n

Nicholas Meyer\u2019s television film<\/a> about a nuclear attack on the US was watched by more than 100 million people when it aired in 1983. One of the people watching was the president. Ronald Reagan wrote in his diary that night that the film was, \u201cvery effective and left me greatly depressed \u2026 My own reaction was one of our having to do all we can to have a deterrent and to see there is never a nuclear war.\u201d The drama helped shift Reagan\u2019s mind on US nuclear policy and he adopted a more diplomatic approach that led to the signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Snake Pit<\/p>\n

Anatole Litvak co-directed the Why We Fight series of propaganda films with Frank Capra, but his 1948 psychological drama The Snake Pit did as much as his documentaries to shift opinion. It tells the story of a woman called Virginia in a psychiatric hospital who can\u2019t remember how she got there. The \u201csnake pit\u201d refers to a large padded room where patients who are deemed beyond help are left and abandoned. Several US states changed laws to improve conditions in psychiatric hospitals as a result.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Should film festivals be more than just screenings and red carpets? Should they prompt us to think about…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":290354,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-290353","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290353"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290353\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/290354"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}