Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters, Nobel-winning writer Annie Ernaux, actor Guy Pearce and a host of Italian and international artists have signed an open letter to the Venice Biennale and the Venice Film Festival calling on the event to take “concrete action” against what they describe as a genocide against the Palestinian people.
The appeal under the Venice4Palestine banner follows a similar open letter to the Venice film festival a year ago that has apparently yielded no tangible results for Gaza. “A new normality… has emerged—thanks in part to a false ceasefire. Israel has not only not stopped, but has continued its atrocities, expanding its firepower toward the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon, and Iran. For the Palestinian people, nothing has changed, and tears are not enough to absolve us: rather, they are evidence that we are unable to draw sufficiently on our collective power of action,” the latest open letter states.
The appeal also calls on Venice to “raise the Palestinian flag for the entire duration of the festival alongside all the other flags representing the films present in the official selection, as is standard practice and as already acknowledged by the festival’s official information sources.”
