Pro-Palestine protests are at every film festival. What’s new about that?
Protests have become a ubiquitous part of daily life; perhaps we should change how we think about them
Sarah Friedland posing with her awards at the Venice Film Festival. Courtesy of Getty Images
By Mira Fox September 10, 2024
It’s film festival season — and the festivals are being interrupted by pro-Palestinian protesters. Four activists disrupted the opening speech at the Toronto Film Festival last week, while more than 300 filmmakers signed a letter urging the Venice Film Festival to pull two of the Israeli films slated to play. Several of the winning filmmakers stated their support for Palestinians in their acceptance speeches.
At this point in the post-Oct. 7 landscape, none of this should come as a surprise. Protesters have shown up to the Academy Awards and the Grammys, as well as to book talks, museums, town halls, political rallies and the Olympics.
Aside from a few truly noteworthy events, like when Kamala Harris had a snappy exchange with protesters at a Detroit rally or when thousands of protesters marched through DC during Benjamin Netanyahu’s congressional address, these protests don’t feel newsworthy; this is just our new normal.
Nevertheless, the pro-Palestine presence at the film festivals has made for plenty of headlines, both within the Jewish world and outside of it; some articles have alleged that fewer Israeli and Jewish films are being featured in these festivals than in years past, implying that antisemitism or simple fear of controversy is pushing Jews out of the cultural sphere.
But are Jews really being written out of the cultural sphere? Do we really need multiple headlines about the four — just four! — people who shouted during a film festival’s opening speech for a mere five minutes?
There are still several Israeli and Jewish films in pride-of-place slots at the festivals; Bliss, by Israeli filmmaker Shemi Zarhin, is one of the centerpiece films at TIFF, and No Other Land, from an Israeli-Palestinian directing duo, is featured in the documentary portion. Despite the boycott letter circulated in Venice, the two films the letter protested — Why War, a conceptual film about letters exchanged between Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein, and Of Dogs and Men, about a girl searching for her dog in a ruined kibbutz in the aftermath of Oct. 7 — both still screened, with a standing ovation for the latter.
Meanwhile, The Brutalist, an ambitious epic about a Hungarian Jewish Holocaust survivor, was one of the splashiest premieres at Venice, and Jewish-American director Sarah Friedland won Best Debut Film at Venice for First Touch, a film about dementia; she used her speech to criticize Israel and state her support for Palestinians.
It’s true that there have often been four or five Jewish or Israeli films at TIFF in the past, but there are plenty of reasons why that gravity might have shifted, such as burgeoning film industries in other countries. And even with pushback, Israeli films are still being featured at the film festivals, and still receiving acclaim. The protests, in short, don’t seem like that big of a deal.
The overall trend of protests is, of course, notable. It’s newsworthy that it’s now just part of daily life to expect to pass a few protesters outside a museum or office. It speaks to the enduring nature of this incarnation of pro-Palestinian activism, which, a year into what looks to be an interminable war, has not faded off the front page and out of people’s social media feeds the way the Ukraine war did, and could influence our upcoming election.
But what’s interesting, at this point, is the way these protests are shifting our discourse and understanding of the situation over the long term. Friedland’s speech specifically criticized “the 336th day of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and 76th year of occupation,” implying that Israel’s entire existence is illegitimate and illegal. That position used to be fringe, so controversial as to be nearly unmentionable, but is creeping into the mainstream. Yet amidst many speeches about Gaza, no one really focuses on that particular detail’s growth in profile, helping it become a basic part of a pro-Palestinian message, increasingly easy for many people to accept as a necessary part of opposing the war.
Much of the coverage does not provide this kind of analysis, though; it simply reports the shocking fact that someone — often no one important — once again referred to the war in Gaza as a genocide or criticized Israel. That was notable when it first started happening, sure, but now it’s just part of our day-to-day life.
The constant race to cover individual incidents distracts from the real story: the conceptual drift into increasingly extreme poles of the conflict, and the fact that the Overton window on Israel has shifted. As we’ve seen by now, these small protests and speeches have little impact; the Israeli films were shown, protest or no. Their cumulative impact, however, has already changed a lot.
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