[Peace-discuss] Fw: Filmmakers, festivals under attack

[Jenifer Cartwright]

Hey, what a GREAT article!! I'm sending it to everyone I know.
 --Jenifer

--- On Sun, 8/23/09, unionyes <unionyes at ameritech.net> wrote:








 
----- Original Message ----- 
From: Steve Zeltzer 
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Sent: Sunday, August 23, 2009 9:41 AM
Subject: Filmmakers, festivals under attack



http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/08/23/INAQ19AH9I.DTL 



Filmmakers, festivals under attack
Deborah Kaufman
Sunday, August 23, 2009


 

Controversies across the globe in recent months have drawn attention to the power of film to address passionately contested political issues and to spark calls from pressure groups demanding boycott and censorship.
These attacks on freedom of expression raise important questions about the relationship between art and politics, balance and subjectivity and who has the authority to deny access to work that might challenge accepted views or offend certain sensibilities:


-- The Chinese government has insisted that this summer's Melbourne Film Festival cancel screenings of "The 10 Conditions of Love," about Rebiya Kadeer, an exiled leader of the minority Uighur ethnic group in central Asia. Hackers attacked and disabled the festival's online ticketing system, and the Chinese government leaned on filmmakers to withdraw seven other films. In spite of e-mailed photos of dead kangaroos and explicit death threats, the festival screened the film.
-- British filmmaker Ken Loach threatened a boycott of the Edinburgh Film Festival unless it returned a small grant from the Israeli Embassy that was to enable a Tel Aviv filmmaker to attend the screening of her film "Surrogate." Loach's intervention, designed to support some activists' calls to isolate Israel, was successful. The festival capitulated, but after widespread public criticism, it used its own funds to bring the filmmaker to Scotland..
-- Theatres in Tokyo canceled screenings of "Yasukuni," a film critical of Japanese militarism, after threats by right-wing nationalists to disrupt the screenings. Harsh criticism rained down from conservative members of Japan's Diet (parliament), and lawsuits were filed against the film's director, but the film was finally shown while heavy police presence at theaters deterred protesters from slashing screens.
-- In San Francisco, the Jewish Film Festival was besieged by a vitriolic e-mail campaign against the decision to host "Rachel," a documentary about American activist Rachel Corrie, killed in Gaza by an Israeli bulldozer while protesting the Israeli occupation. Hard-liners contended that the film's subject matter, its point of view and the festival's invited speaker (Cindy Corrie, Rachel's mother) were "unacceptable" and "outside the tent." The festival went ahead with the program in spite of efforts to vilify and defund the 29-year-old festival.
These controversies echo the clamor of the "culture wars" of the 1990s, when conservatives like Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh joined the Christian Coalition in viciously attacking the Public Broadcasting System and the National Endowment for the Arts for what they called deviant or inappropriate programming.
At that time, I was director of the Jewish Film Festival and was working across the hall from Marlon Riggs, whose "Tongues Untied," a brave and poetic documentary about being black and gay, was to have its national broadcast on PBS' "POV" series. A small part of the film's funding was a grant from a public agency, but that was enough for presidential candidate Pat Buchanan and his allies to begin a blitzkrieg of homophobic bullying at Riggs and PBS. PBS withstood the firestorm, but 17 local affiliates succumbed to pressure not to air the program.
Today's attacks on freedom of expression, cultural diversity and democratic access could be even more dangerous than the witch-hunters of the religious right. They come from the largest nations and the smallest political groups. Enabled by the speed of the Internet and the Web's culture of flaming, they spread globally as fast as swine flu. The sustained focus on curators and festivals, as well as artists, is doubly troubling, because the presenting organizations are the bridge to the public. Artists might be shaping new ideas, but curators and their organizations are often the overlooked heroes on the front lines of this new battle against censorship.
Often forgotten in these battles are the many thousands in the audience hungry for knowledge, political debate and unfettered creativity who continue to line up at theaters from Melbourne to Edinburgh, Tokyo to San Francisco. If the puritans and censors win this round, what happens next?
Deborah Kaufman is a documentary filmmaker and the founding director of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, which she headed from 1980 to 1993. Contact us at forum at sfchronicle.com.
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