The boss of Israel’s Jerusalem Film Festival, Roni Mahadav-Levin, has written an open letter urging Palestinian filmmakers to take part in next year’s edition.
“To artists around the world, and specifically to Palestinian filmmakers, my call to you is this: grab the opportunity to reach the public in our cinema halls,” Mahadav-Levin wrote in the open letter, which is published in full below.
Of this year’s festival, which concluded Sunday, he said: “When the lights went down in our theaters, the audience was not a monolith. The cinemas were filled with diverse crowds, Jews and Arabs, secular and religious citizens, locals and internationals. For a few hours, they were united by a shared narrative on the screen. The debates that sparked in the lobby afterward, confronting uncomfortable truths about our society or sharing moments of profound empathy, were the building blocks of a resilient society. This is where hardline narratives are challenged. This is where the status quo is disrupted.”
The 43rd edition of the Jerusalem Film Festival opened July 9 and ran until July 19. While there continue to be calls for boycott of all Israeli-linked film institutions, a number of Palestinian and Arab-Israeli filmmakers participated in this year’s Jerusalem Film Festival.
