Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman is photographed in Toronto during the Toronto International Film Festival.JENNIFER ROBERTS
Palestinian director Elia Suleiman says he resisted pressure from the Muslim media to withdraw his feature film, The Time That Remains, from the Toronto International Film Festival.
Suleiman said in an interview that various journalists and newspapers urged him to join the political protest over TIFF's controversial decision to spotlight Tel Aviv in its new City to City program.
"They wanted me to protest in a boycotting fashion," Suleiman said in an interview. "But I reject [that]entirely. You have to take your own moral equations. To boycott the festival is to me exactly what the right wing usually comes to do, so we'd just be mimicking those who are in authority.
"It's so intriguing - why are there no lessons learned from this history? We as individuals have to do our own work, internally, to kill the little fascist inside of us - and not teach boycott theories and harassment, basically."
Today, actor/director Sarah Polley made her fist public statement on the issue, telling The Globe and Mail that she too resisted pressure to sign the Toronto Declaration.
Polley said she was in sympathy, however, with the basic protest, and felt TIFF programmers had erred in choosing Tel Aviv so soon after the war in Gaza.
Canadian documentarian John Greyson and Sherif Mandour, producer of the Egyptian feature Heliopolis, withdrew films to protest what they saw as a de facto collusion in an Israeli government campaign to polish that nation's international image.
Israeli consular officials said a year ago that they hoped the country would have a presence at TIFF, although festival officials have said there was no undue influence behind the programming decision to choose Tel Aviv for the inaugural spotlight. Ten films were ultimately chosen, many of them critical of Israeli society. Greyson's withdrawal sparked a flurry of statements, press conferences and op-ed pieces, either in support or in criticism of the protest. High profile names such as Danny Glover, Harry Belafonte and Viggo Mortensen added their names to the list of protesters, while others, such as Jerry Seinfeld, Natalie Portman, Norman Jewison and David Mamet, called the anti-TIFF campaign ill-considered and misguided. As TIFF began to wind down Thursday, both sides in the simmering political brouhaha were claiming victory.
A statement issued by the protesters claimed that "despite all the overheated language and misinformation … we have managed to turn the spotlight on the festival and asked it to take responsibility for the political choice it made to celebrate Tel Aviv and make TIFF this year, the year of the Gaza assault, a showpiece for the Brand Israel propaganda campaign. Defamation, intimidation, and diversion won't stop us from protesting crimes that no amount of rebranding can erase."
For its part, the United Jewish Appeal Federation of Greater Toronto accused signatories to the so-called Toronto Declaration, the letter signed by the protesters and posted on the web, of creating "a rhetorical smokescreen by denying its advocacy of blacklisting…They have insulted Israeli filmmakers and the integrity of TIFF organizers when they accuse TIFF of participating in a government propaganda campaign by spotlighting their films. Anyone who has seen these films understands the absurdity of this allegation. If, as they claim, TIFF's decision to highlight Israeli cinema was political, then all decisions regarding the screening of films from all countries are political as well."