TEL AVIV – The Israeli government is going to pull out of a Paris film festival it helped fund after organisers chose a movie centering on its military’s atrocities against Palestinians as the event’s headliner, according to Variety.
Samuel Maoz’s Foxtrot, which follows a family grieving over the death of their son while on active service with the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), intertwining their side of the story with an account of the man’s experiences while assigned to a remote checkpoint in northern Israel, is set to open the Israeli Film Festival in Paris on March 13.
The film earned the Grand Jury Prize in Venice, swept Israel’s Ophir Awards – the Jewish state’s equivalent of the Academy Awards – and was shortlisted for the Oscar for best foreign-language film before falling short of this year’s list of five nominees.
https://youtu.be/NTHQhMW5iIE
But the movie has proven to be a nuisance for controversial Israeli culture minister Miri Regev, who has denounced the film over a scene in which the Israeli military covers up the deaths of a carload of Palestinian teenagers.
After its triumph at Venice last Septemeber, the former IDF spokewoman wrote on Facebook, “When an Israeli film wins an international prize, the heart fills with pride and my natural desire is to strengthen and encourage the Israeli success….This rule has one exception – when the international embrace is the result of self-flagellation and cooperation with the anti-Israel narrative.”
Maoz, as well as the film’s leading man, Lior Ashkenazi, have been accused of being traitors and anti-government agents in a flurry of online posts following Regev’s denunciations. Maoz says that he has been threatened with acid attacks in posts that listed his private home address, and Ashkenazi’s 5-year-old daughter was even the subject of death threats.
The Israeli Film Festival in Paris is run by the French film association Kolnoah (the Hebrew word for “cinema”). In addition to a stipend from the Israeli Foreign Ministry, it receives backing from the Israeli Film Fund, the Israeli Film Council and a handful of French-Jewish organizations.
Although it is too late for the Israeli Foreign Ministry to withdraw the funding it has already provided for the 2018 festival, the decision to headline the festival with Foxtrot is likely to have an impact on discussions for funding in 2019 and beyond.
