Do I want to watch arthouse films with fascists? No thanks, Berlin | Fatma Aydemir

With Germany rocked by revelations about the AfD, the Berlin film festival's excuse for inviting them never made sense

When the Berlin international film festival's co-director Mariette Rissenbeek declared in an interview last week that the festival doesn't strive to position itself politically, especially in times when we don't know where politics are heading", I almost laughed at the sheer clumsiness. If only it wasn't so sad. Rissenbeek was reacting to the disclosure that politicians from the far-right Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) had been invited to the festival's opening gala on 15 February, a decision that provoked an open letter of protest from 200 film-makers and outrage on social media. The excuse that all the members of the Bundestag's 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.

For weeks, hundreds of thousands of people have been taking to the streets of German cities protesting against the AfD, many of them demanding a a legal ban 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 German enough" would be a target for remigration", 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.

Fatma Aydemir is a Guardian Europe columnist

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