Natalie Portman and French director Justine Teret (Anatomy of a fall(and Jacques Audiard)Emilia Perez) Join an open letter condemning the cultural boycott of Israeli director Nadav Lapid.
Lapid was scheduled to attend the Marseille International Film Festival in July as part of the jury, but withdrew after pressure from pro-Palestinian filmmakers, who threatened to withdraw their films from selection if Lapid participated.
The Israeli director is considered one of the most vocal critics of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and has lived in France since 2021. His latest feature film, Yesis a scathing satire about the extremism of contemporary Israeli society and the complicity of the country’s artistic community in killings in Gaza and the West Bank. But because the film was partly financed by the Israel Film Fund, some pro-Palestinian activists have accused Lapid of collusion with the Israeli government and called for a boycott of him and his works.
On Monday, more than 350 prominent figures in the French film industry gathered, including producers Said Ben Said (deer(and Judith Le Levy)Dahomey), along with directors Stephane Demoustier (Big bow(And Mati Diop)The Atlanticists, Dahomey), signed an open letter published in a French newspaper Le Monde He described the cultural boycott of Lapid as an “intellectual failure.”
“This is the greatest dissident artist in Israel [who] “He tirelessly denounces his government’s fascist and colonial tendencies and its criminal moral failures in films that have won awards around the world. He should be forced to withdraw from a French festival. This should alarm and mobilize us beyond this absurdity. It should alert us to the obvious truth: whatever crimes their country may commit, no person can be reduced to a passport,” the letter read.
The signatories of the letter say that Lapid, like Russian directors or Iranian dissidents, should not bear responsibility for “crimes committed by governments of which they are often their harshest critics.” They say that continuing to invite these artists to festivals puts more political pressure on authoritarian regimes than boycotting them. They point to Russian director Andrei Zvyagintsev, who won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival last month for his film Minotaur She used the concert to call on Vladimir Putin to “end the slaughter” in Ukraine.
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