Boycott campaign hits Toronto Film Festival for showcasing Israeli movies

16 September 2009

This year’s Toronto Film Festival’s spotlight on Tel Aviv has led to a boycott by filmmakers from a number of countries. The Egyptian Ahmad Abdalla withdrew his film ‘Heliopolis’ from the schedule to protest the presentation of ten films on the major Israeli city for the festival's City to City program.

Some 50 intellectuals and filmmakers, including directors Ken Loach and John Greyson, author Naomi Klein and actors Jane Fonda and Danny Glover, accused the festival – considered North America's most important one – of "complicity with the Israeli propaganda machine", given "the absence of Palestinian filmmakers in the program." The program ignored “the suffering of thousands of former residents and descendants of the Tel Aviv/Jaffa area who currently live in refugee camps in the Occupied Territories" after a "mass exiling of the Palestinian population" in 1948, they said in an open letter to festival organizers.

Over 100 filmmakers, including Jewish Hollywood stars Jerry Seinfeld, Sacha Baron Cohen and Natalie Portman, blasted the boycott campaign. In a letter they stated: "We applaud the Toronto International Film Festival for including the Israeli film community in the Festival's City to City program. The visiting filmmakers represent a dynamic national cinema, the best of Israel's open, uncensored artistic expression. Anyone who has actually seen recent Israeli cinema, movies that are political and personal, comic and tragic, often critical, knows they are in no way a propaganda arm for any government policy. Those who refuse to see these films for themselves or prevent them from being seen by others are violating a cherished right shared by Canada and all democratic countries."