Those claims were made a day before by PACBI, which called for a boycott of all films funded by the foundation.
A BDS campaign against the screening of the world premiere of an Israeli film at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland has received the support of a handful of Israeli filmmakers and artists.
My Neighbor Adolf, a tragicomedy, by Russian-born Israeli director Leon Prudovsky (Five Hours From Paris), is currently set to get a screening in Locarno on August 4, the second day of the festival, but the group has signed a letter calling on this event to be pulled because of the film’s support by the Rabinovich Foundation’s Israel Cinema Project, Israel’s largest film fund.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, the group of artists, which includes Oscar-nominated director Guy Davidi (Five Broken Cameras) Dror Dayan (documentary filmmaker), Avi Hershkovitz (filmmaker), Liad Hussein Kantorowicz (artist, musician), Jonathan Ofir (conductor, violinist), Michal Sapir (musician, writer) and Eyal Sivan (filmmaker), are claiming that the Foundation had attached “racist and explicitly political strings” to its funding.
Those claims were made a day before by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI, the cultural arm of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement), which called for a boycott of all films funded by the foundation.
PACBI asserts that the Rabinovich Foundation is contractually obligating producers to agree that their films don’t include any statement or message that denies the “existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state,” something it says goes against the reporting of human rights organizations including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and B’Tselem, who have all described Israel as deploying an “apartheid” system against Palestinians.
The Israeli artists’ statement
The Israeli artists wrote in their statement that “this regime of oppression [Israel] was founded through the violent displacement and dispossession of most of the indigenous Palestinian population. That the Israeli state, its complicit institutions and influential lobby groups would want us as Jewish Israelis to remain silent on this systematic ethnic cleansing is not surprising. But storytellers accepting such censorial and unethical conditions for their film projects is an undeniable form of complicity in covering up this ongoing Nakba that Palestinians face.“
The Rabinovich Foundation told the Hollywood Reporter that the excerpts of its contract cited by PACBI weren’t new, and had been added not by the Foundation itself but by Israeli law legislated in 2011.
“This regime of oppression [Israel] was founded through the violent displacement and dispossession of most of the indigenous Palestinian population. That the Israeli state, its complicit institutions and influential lobby groups would want us as Jewish Israelis to remain silent on this systematic ethnic cleansing is not surprising.”
Israeli artists
“This Israeli law obliges all institutions funded by the State of Israel (film funds, theaters, dance groups, etc.),” it stated. “Like all Israeli film funds, the Rabinovich Foundation is funded by the Israel Ministry of Culture and Sport, and like all Israeli film funds, the foundation is obliged by this law.”
My Neighbor Adolf stars David Hayman (The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, Sid and Nancy) as a Holocaust survivor living in Colombia in 1960, in the period just after Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann was caught by Mossad agents in Argentina. When a mysterious old German man (Udo Kier) moves in next door, he begins to suspect his new neighbor is Adolf Hitler. But to find the evidence, he will first have to get closer to the man, so close there’s a danger the two could become friends.