Nobel Prize-winning writer Annie Ernaux, Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters and directors Isabel Coixet and Matteo Garrone are among signatories of an open letter issued on Friday calling for the Venice Film Festival “to take concrete action in support of Palestine.”
The open letter comes from the Venice4Palestine collective that took a similar initiative last year, albeit with more specific requests to festival organizers such as urging the event’s organizers to withdraw invitations to Gerard Butler and Gal Gadot over their previous support for Israel.
“One year after its first appeal, Venice4Palestine is once again calling on the Venice Biennale [the festival’s parent org], the Venice International Film Festival and professionals across the film, audiovisual and cultural sectors to take concrete action in support of Palestine,” the collective wrote in the open letter.
Signatories of the Venice4Palestine letter also include Nan Goldin, Paul Laverty, Teona Strugar Mitevska, Saleh Bakri and Céline Sciamma as well as Italy’s Anna Foglietta, Fabrizio Gifuni, Greta Scarano, Jasmine Trinca and Luigi Lo Cascio.
The appeal is also backed by Italian and international associations and collectives, including Global Sumud Flotilla, which has tried to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza by sea, BDS Italia, Artists for Palestine Italia and France, FRACBI (French Coordination for the Academic, Cultural and Sporting Boycott of Israel), Artisti #NoBavaglio, AMLETA, the Italian Casting Directors Union (UICD) and Italy’s Voci per la Palestina (Voices for Palestine) activists’ org.
“As workers in the film, audiovisual and cultural sectors, we believe it is time to organize collective action to make a concrete impact on the mechanisms of complicity and normalization,” the appeal says.
“Like all sectors of the arts and culture, the film industry is composed of various segments in the production and distribution chain: financing, co-productions, distribution agreements, sales, festivals and retrospectives as well as partnerships with festivals and sponsors,” it adds. “Each of these links can contribute to normalizing the barbarity currently being unleashed, or it can oppose it and stop it. We must therefore demand transparency at every stage of this chain and suspend all agreements with entities and institutions linked to the Israeli government,” it adds, calling for a general cultural boycott of Israel, “as a tool to pressure institutions and as a form of resistance.”
The Venice4Palestine letter also calls for the Palestinian flag to be flown throughout the festival to underline the presence in the event’s official selection of two Palestinian films: Ahmed Hassouna’s “Citizen Osama,” which portrays a photographer as he attempts to juggle his roles as father and a journalist while capturing the realities of war in Gaza, and Muayad Alayan’s “Conversation with the Sea,” about a 60-year-old Palestinian man named Kamal who becomes entangled in a tendentious web of Israeli bureaucracy.
The Venice Film Festival had no immediate comment.
Venice has never shied away from political controversy, or from films that put the plight of Palestinians on screen.
Kaouther Ben Hania’s Gaza-set “The Voice of Hind Rajab” won the Silver Lion last year after eliciting a 22-minute standing ovation, which stands as the fest’s longest.
“NAZA,” a new hot-button documentary from “No Other Land” directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, was added on Monday to the Venice competition lineup. Expect it to spark up some political heat.
The doc, which was shot at night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, shows “in detail the systems behind Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza,” according to its official synopsis.
The collective also announced the panel “And Yet Gaza Continues to Burn – What Is the Point of Seeing if We Do Not Act?,” which will take place under the aegis of the fest’s separately run section Giornate degli Autori, also known as Venice Days. The panel, on Sept. 8, will gather international law experts who, among other topics, are expected to discuss what the appeal describes as a [legal] tool enabling any film worker to disassociate themselves from complicity in the crimes Israel continues to commit.” And to be able do so “with impunity.”
The 83rd Venice Film Festival runs from Sept. 2 to 12.
