Israeli anti-war film 'Lebanon' wins Golden Lion in Venice while
Loach and Fonda demand a boycott of Tel Aviv films in Toronto
By Jack Bremer
SEPTEMBER 14, 2009
The Toronto film festival, which opened at the end of last week,
overlapping with Venice, has been hit by a censorship storm
concerning its decision to choose Tel Aviv for its inaugural 'city
spotlight' section. A line-up of well-known protestors - including
Jane Fonda, Ken Loach and Noam Chomsky - has backed a call by a
little-known Canadian documentary maker John Greyson to boycott the
Tel Aviv films.
Greyson said this was "not the year" to celebrate 'Brand Israel' in
the light of the invasion of Gaza and the continued expansion of
illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian land. As a result, Fonda,
Loach, Chomsky and others signed a joint letter titled 'The Toronto
Declaration - No Celebration of Occupation'. It claimed that the
festival "whether intentionally or not, has become complicit in the
Israeli propaganda machine".
However, their protest has been thrown into sharp relief by the fact
that an Israeli film, Lebanon (above), won Venice's Golden Lion for
best film at the weekend. Moreover, it is a film that could never be
called propaganda. Set almost entirely inside an Israeli tank at the
start of the 1982 Lebanon War, it carries a powerful anti-war message.
Its director, Samuel Maoz, who based his script on his own traumatic
experience as a tank gunner during that war, said there were powerful
voices in Israel who had been opposed to his film competing at
Venice. He added: "I suppose ever filmmaker has the naïve, even
pathetic dream that his film could be the one that finally stops a war."
A Hollywood producer attending Toronto told The First Post last
night: "The Golden Lion for Lebanon has made Fonda and co look
foolish. I admire Ken Loach as a film-maker but there are a lot of
people here who wish he'd stop using these events to score cheap
political points."
He was referring to the fact that Loach tried to force boycotts at
both the Melbourne and Edinburgh film festivals this summer. In
Melbourne he withdrew his film Looking for Eric when he discovered
the festival was part-sponsored by Israel. In Edinburgh he led a
campaign to force festival organisers to return a £300 grant from the
Israeli Embassy designed to pay for a young Tel Aviv filmmaker, Tali
Shalom Ezer, to travel to Scotland for the screening of her film, Surrogate.
Prominent American and Canadian Jews had already reacted angrily to
the Fonda-Loach Toronto boycott before the news of Lebanon's victory
in Venice came through on Saturday night.
Marvin Hier, founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles,
said: "Tel Aviv is one of the freest cities in the world, warts and
all: a model city of diversity, freedom of expression and tolerance,
for Arabs and Jews. It is the height of hypocrisy to single out Tel Aviv."
The veteran Canadian director Ivan Reitman, who made the mega-hit
Ghostbusters, said: "Film is about exploring the complexities and
contradictions of the human condition. Any attempt to silence that
conversation, to hijack the festival for any political agenda in the
end, only serves to silence artistic voices."
Samuel Moaz, director of Lebanon, asked by the Observer to comment on
the Toronto boycott, said: "The point of a film like mine is to open
a dialogue, to get people talking to each other about important
issues. It makes no sense to boycott art. Maybe I wouldn't have won
if Jane Fonda was on the jury, but she wasn't."
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