Israeli filmmakers and artists including Oscar-nominated director Guy Davidi and Turner Prize co-winner Tai Shani have urged Locarno International Film Festival to cancel its Thursday screening of an Israeli film due to concerns over its funding. That the Israeli state, its complicit institutions and influential lobby groups would want us as Jewish Israelis to remain silent on this systematic ethnic cleansing is not surprising. But storytellers accepting such censorial and unethical conditions for their film projects is an undeniable form of complicity in covering up this ongoing Nakba that Palestinians face.
It is a cinema of misrepresentation which should have no place in any film festival. Israel is an apartheid state, as Palestinians, South Africans and legal scholars have long argued, and as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have in the last few years confirmed in detailed reports.
This regime of oppression was founded through the violent displacement and dispossession of most of the Indigenous Palestinian population. The largest Palestinian civil society coalition that is leading the peaceful Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions BDS movement has called on international film festivals to refuse to screen Rabinovich-funded films for this reason.
In the case of My Neighbor Adolf, it is the political conditions attached to the funding of the film that is the issue. We refuse to be silent while the Israeli regime of apartheid, occupation and settler-colonialism oppresses Palestinians and while its public institutions such as the Rabinovich Foundation engenders racism and complicity among filmmakers.
We echo the Palestinian call for the boycott of Rabinovich-funded films, and we call on Locarno Film Festival to cancel its complicit screening. Reblogged this on penelopap. Like Like. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive. Type your email…. Continue reading. August 2, November 18, Like Loading Campaign to silence rapper and campaigner Lowkey reaches new low.
