The co-founder of an Israeli film festival has criticised British cinema chains for refusing to allow screenings over safety fears and accused them of letting culture “be cancelled”.
Odelia Haroush, who co-founded the Seret International Film Festival in Britain in 2012, said both the Curzon and Picturehouse chains had refused to host screenings for this year’s event despite being long-term partners.
Haroush said the festival had also been forced to withdraw screenings from Cambridge “because of the political atmosphere with the university and students there”.
“Their role should be to show films and culture and not cancel culture,” Haroush said. “Especially now; don’t cancel Palestinian culture, Russian culture, Ukrainian culture or Israeli culture.
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“It is not that I am going to show [films] that show everything is blooming and great in Israel. We pick films on their artistic values and not political values. But I believe from the bottom of my heart in free speech.”
She said the filmmakers were “not the ones to blame for what is going on in Israel”, adding that it was important the country’s culture was seen in the rest of the world.
“This is why I am fighting; I want to show their work outside Israel,” she said adding however that “the pressures on cinema houses and the pressure not to go and see a film is very, very big now”.
Seret, which last year showed more than 20 films at nine cinemas in London, Brighton and Cambridge, has faced difficulties with the sister events it has already held in Barcelona and Amsterdam this year.
Haroush said the festival had been forced to find a new venue in 24 hours in Spain after one operator banned a screening while protesters became “violent” at screenings in the Netherlands.
Seret has faced boycott threats before. In 2015 film-makers including Ken Loach and Peter Kosminsky called for Curzon and Odeon to drop the festival which they said was funded by the Israeli government. Loach objected again in 2018 when Edinburgh’s Cameo Picturehouse became a festival venue.
Haroush said state funding was less than 5 per cent of the festival’s budget adding that the charity received “much more funding” from the “very left-wing” New Israel Fund which she said “believes in a two-state solution”.
The Israel-born mother of two, who has lived in London for decades, said Picturehouse had told her in November that “it is not going to work” with an executive adding: “We are afraid for our staff and for our visitors”.
She said Curzon had originally agreed to host screenings again but following an Israeli strike on a food truck in Gaza in February its management had withdrawn the offer.
Curzon, which held screenings for the London Palestine Film Festival in November and December last year, did not respond to requests for a comment. Picturehouse also made no comment.
This year’s festival, due to be held in May, is now restricted to one small venue in Brighton and a handful of locations in northwest London.
The film festival is the latest British cultural event to be affected by hostilities in Gaza. The Barbican is being boycotted by artists after it backed out of hosting a lecture series which included one speaker who was going to say Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. Home Theatre in Manchester said that a Palestinian literature event could go ahead, a week after it had cancelled it over safety concerns for organisers and attendees.
The Royal Society of Literature also upset scores of the country’s leading writers who accused it of censorship for cancelling its annual magazine because of one article which referred to the “devastating machinery of the Israeli state in operation”.
Meanwhile Jonathan Glazer, the British Jewish film director who won an Oscar this year with his Holocaust drama The Zone of Interest, has been criticised by some in the film world after saying in his acceptance speech that he and film producer James Wilson “stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many innocent people”.
