While there will be no Israeli movies this year in the major competitions at the upcoming Venice Film Festival, a group of mostly Italian film industry professionals released a letter over the weekend saying that the festival management needs to do more to condemn Israel’s actions in the war in Gaza and to support Palestinians.
The festival opens on August 27 and runs until September 6.
The letter, which was released by the group V4P (Venice4Palestine), called on the Venice Film Festival, as well as its parent body, the Biennale, and the festival sections Venice Days and the International Critics’ Week, which are administered by independent panels, “to be more courageous and clear in condemning the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the ethnic cleansing across Palestine carried out by the Israeli government and army.”
The opening of the letter, which references the W.H. Auden poem read in a key scene in Four Weddings and a Funeral, reads, “Stop the clocks, turn off the stars. The burden is too much to carry on living as before. For almost two years now, images of unmistakable clarity have been reaching us from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Incredulous and helpless, we keep witnessing the torment of a genocide carried out live by the State of Israel in Palestine. No one will ever be able to say: ‘I couldn’t know, I couldn’t imagine, I couldn’t believe.’”
No other humanitarian crises or wars mentioned
The letter doesn’t reference any other humanitarian crises in the Middle East, or around the world, such as the one in Yemen, where, according to the UN itself, five million people are on the brink of famine, part of more than 17 million people on the brink of food insecurity.
The V4P letter stated that Israel persecuted Palestinians prior to October 7 and calls on the film festival “to uphold the truth about ethnic cleansing, apartheid, illegal occupation of Palestinian territories, colonialism and all the other crimes against humanity committed by Israel for decades.”
The letter was signed by many prominent directors, writers, producers, actors, and other professionals, including Marco Bellocchio, Laura Morante, Abel Ferrara, Matteo Garrone, Valeria Golino, and Fiorella Mannoia. Sisters Alice Rohrwacher, a director, and Alba Rohrwacher, an actress who attended the Haifa International Film Festival in 2014 and starred in Three Floors, an adaptation of a novel by Israeli author Eshkol Nevo, were also among the signatories.
The Biennale responded by saying that they and the Venice festival “have always been, throughout their history, places of open discussion and sensitivity to all the most pressing issues facing society and the world. The evidence of this is, first and foremost, the works that are being presented [at the festival].”
Their response pointed out that The Voice of Hind Rajab, a movie by Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania, about the killing of a five-year-old girl in a bombing by the IDF in Gaza in 2024, will be shown in competition at Venice this year.
The festival also noted that last year’s Venice lineup featured Israeli director Dani Rosenberg’s film Of Dogs and Men, about a girl searching for her dog that went missing during the October 7 attack, and wrote, “The Biennale is, as always, open to dialogue.”
Given this openness, perhaps it’s only a coincidence that there are no Israeli films in the main competitions, and that the sole film listed as coming from Israel is Eddie and I by Maya Shekel, an interactive virtual reality film about a deaf boy on a camping trip in the Venice Immersive section.
Hagai Levi, who co-created the series BeTipul and Our Boys, will premiere his latest series, Etty, about the life of Etty Hillesum, which is a Dutch-German-French co-production, out of competition at Venice this year.
Levi was one of 31 Israeli artists and academics who signed a letter to The Guardian in July calling for the international community to impose “crippling sanctions” on Israel to pressure the country into signing a ceasefire agreement with Hamas.
Israeli movies once had a strong presence at Venice, with Samuel Maoz’s Lebanon winning the Golden Lion, the festival’s top honor, in 2009, and his 2017 film, Foxtrot, won the Silver Jury Grand Prize in 2017. Maoz also signed the letter calling for sanctions on Israel in July.
Ronit Elkabetz and Shlomi Elkabetz’s To Take a Wife won the Audience Award at Critics’ Week in 2004. The Volpi Cup at the festival for Best Actress went to Hadas Yaron in 2012 for Rama Burshtein’s Fill the Void, and Kais Nashif won the Venice Horizons Award for Best Actor for Sameh Zoabi’s Tel Aviv on Fire in 2018. Director Amos Gitai has won 10 awards at Venice over the years.