Agencies-Gaza post
PACBI to boycott of Israeli embassy-partnered Doc Edge film festival
The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) on Wednesday called to boycott Doc Edge Festival in New Zealand until it decreases its partnership with the embassy of apartheid Israel.
PACBI, a founding partner of the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC), the most extensive entity in Palestinian society that directs the global BDS movement, said in a press statement that at least a hundred artists, including Hollywood stars, just criticized the Israeli occupation forces’ murder of prominent Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. Film directors including Pedro Almodovar, Mira Nair, Jim Jarmusch, Carol Morley, Boots Riley, Asif Kapadia, Ken Loach, and Mike Leigh decried the hypocrisy of Western governments who “have rushed to impose blanket boycotts and sanctions in response to Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine”, while they “continue to fund and shield Israel’s decades-long occupation and grave human rights offenses against Palestinians”.
The artists, including actors Susan Sarandon, Miriam Margolyes, Tilda Swinton, Mark Ruffalo, Kathryn Hahn, and Eric Cantona ended: “There must be no double standards when it comes to the main human right to freedom from persecution and oppression and the right to life and to dignity.”
These film professionals join thousands of international artists who have called for effective steps to hold apartheid Israel to account for its brutal oppression of Palestinians. More than two hundred queer filmmakers have pledged not to submit films to or otherwise participate in “events partially or fully sponsored by complicit Israeli organizations until Israel complies with international law and appreciates Palestinian human rights”. Actors including Gael García Bernal, Maxine Peake, Peter Capaldi, Viggo Mortensen, Harriet Walter, and Charles Dance endorsed “meaningful solidarity with Palestinians struggling for their human rights under international law”.
Indigenous Palestinians, motivated partly by the international boycotts against apartheid in South Africa, are calling for international artists, including documentary filmmakers, to show meaningful solidarity with our struggle by refusing to screen with film festivals and institutions that are complicit in Israel’s regime of apartheid, military occupation, and settler-colonialism. PACBI said that Doc Edge is complicit through its art-washing collaboration with apartheid Israel while urging all film professionals to boycott it until it drops the Israeli embassy as an official festival supporter.
The BDS movement made it clear that it categorically denies censorship and upholds the universal right to freedom of expression as defined in the United Nations’ International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and added that the institutional boycott it is calling for is in harmony with this right.
“Beyond the scope of BDS guidelines for the international cultural boycott of Israel, activists may still choose to advocate a “common sense” boycott against a documentary film that, say, incites racial hatred, whitewashes war crimes, tries to normalize apartheid, and military occupation, etc. While these “common sense” boycotts are outside the realm of BDS, no documentary film should have a free pass to promote the violation of international law, whether it is an Israeli, US or NZ production; consistently applying the same principle to all. Any film institution that programmed such a film would expect “common sense” boycotts from conscientious film audiences.”
Source: WAFA
