Wim Wenders clarifies that he does not believe film-makers should stay out of politics | Wim Wenders

The director Wim Wenders has clarified personal views on the relationship between cinema and politics that caused controversy earlier in the year, saying at the Venice film festival that he does not believe film-makers ought to stay out of politics altogether.

At the Berlin film festival, where the veteran German director was acting as the jury president, Wenders had said at a press conference that “we have to stay out of politics because if we make movies that are dedicatedly political, we enter the field of politics.”

The remark drew much attention amid criticism of the German government’s support of Israel over the war in Gaza, and incensed some fellow film-makers, with the Indian author Arundhati Roy calling the comments “unconscionable” and pulling out of an event in the German capital.

Asked by the Guardian at a press conference in Venice whether he still stood by the comments, Wenders said he “could repeat the same thing” but conceded he “could be more explicit”.

“What I said then was, as film-makers, we are the opposite of politicians. We have empathy. Politics work without empathy; that’s all I said,” said the auteur, who had come to the Lido to present a new documentary about the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor.

“We have a very different thing. I’m not working with a mindset of politicians, we are working with a mindset of empathetic people. And we are into changing things, politics are into confirming what is.”

The director behind Wings of Desire and Kings of the Road continued: “That’s what I said, and was quoted as: ‘We have to stay out of politics,’ and that is not what I said, because it’s not what I said now, and I said the same thing then.

“The frame of film-makers is a different mindset than the mindset of politicians, and we should not work with that mindset. We work with a different set of rules. I said it again, and I hope you’re not misquoting me, and say we have to stay out of politics because we do the opposite. We are the antidote.”

From Inside Out: The Architecture of Peter Zumthor is a 3D film that follows similar portrayals of Cuban musical ensemble Buena Vista Social Club, choreographer Pina Bausch and artist Anselm Kiefer, exploring the Pritzker prize-winning architect’s philosophy through portraits of his most notable buildings.

They include Kunsthaus Bregenz’s concrete cube on Lake Constance and the “amoeba-shaped” David Geffen Galleries of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, but also more practical structures such as shelters for a Roman archaeological site in Chur, Switzerland, and Alpine chapels.

Praising the architect’s buildings, Wenders said architecture and politics were “linked in many ways”. He referenced the controversy over the site of the former Gestapo and SS headquarters in Berlin, which Zumthor was chosen in 1993 to turn into the Topography of Terror memorial museum, but whose plans were later scrapped by the the German capital’s senate due to funding problems.

“They didn’t stop it because it was too expensive,” Wenders said in Venice. “They stopped it because [they] thought it was more than necessary, because they already had the Holocaust memorial and they already had the Jewish Museum. So what they did instead, they built something cheap.”

The “political act” of Zumthor’s original building, Wenders said, was to make the historical structure “invisible” and “show documents” instead. The redesigned historical site that opened to the public in 2010, he said, “doesn’t speak, and politics don’t want places to speak, politics wants control over the show”.