By Michael Regenstreif
This column was written just as the 34th annual Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), scheduled for September 10 to 19, was getting underway. One of the world’s premiere film festivals, TIFF introduced a new series this year, City to City, with a goal of showcasing and celebrating a vital filmmaking scene in a different international city each year.
Given its success as a filmmaking centre, its vibrant and diverse cosmopolitan nature, and the fact that it is now celebrating its centennial year, Tel Aviv was chosen to be the first locale to fall under TIFF’s City to City spotlight and 10 movies made in Tel Aviv were scheduled to be shown during the festival. Reading their descriptions, they all sound interesting. I hope that I get to see them sometime.
Of course, when it comes to anything to do with Israel in a public forum, there just has to be some sort of invented controversy.
On August 27, John Greyson, a well-known director of gay-themed films and a professor of film studies at York University in Toronto, wrote to the TIFF program directors to announce he was withdrawing his documentary short, Covered, from the festival in protest over the choice of Tel Aviv for TIFF’s City to City spotlight.
In his letter, Greyson quoted author Naomi Klein describing Tel Aviv as “a kind of alter-Gaza, the smiling face of Israeli apartheid” and said that celebrating Tel Aviv in 2009 was “akin to celebrating Montgomery buses in 1963, California grapes in 1969, Chilean wines in 1973, Nestlés infant formula in 1984, or South African fruit in 1991.”
Greyson demanded to know why all of the Tel Aviv films were made by Israeli Jews.
“Why are there no voices from the refugee camps and Gaza (or Toronto for that matter), where Tel Aviv’s displaced Palestinians now live?” he asked.
By now, you too may be scratching your head wondering how Greyson knows about Palestinian refugees displaced from Tel Aviv who now live in Gaza and Toronto when Tel Aviv was built on what were empty sand dunes a century ago.
Greyson is a leader of Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QAIA), and Covered, the film he pulled from the festival, is about homophobic violence aimed at a gay film festival in Sarajevo.
The whole concept of “queers against Israeli apartheid” strikes me as very strange considering that Israel is the only country in the Middle East in which LGBTQ persons can live openly and freely out of the closet, while Israel is almost certainly the only country in the Middle East in which Greyson could show a film like Covered. There are no gay film festivals in Hamas’ Gaza. But there are in Tel Aviv.
Ironically, one of the Tel Aviv films that Greyson is protesting is The Bubble, a 2006 movie in Hebrew and Arabic about a gay love relationship between an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian Arab.
Greyson and an ad hoc committee of likeminded anti-Israel activists, including Naomi Klein, who emerged as their spokesperson in the Globe and Mail and on her blog, published a document called Toronto Declaration: No Celebration of Occupation denouncing the TIFF spotlight on Tel Aviv – as if Tel Aviv was under occupation – in which they essentially repeat the same accusations in Greyson’s letter withdrawing his film.
Last issue in this space, I talked about how attempts to suppress the offensive Israel Apartheid Week poster or the keeping of the offensive, fringe British MP George Galloway out of Canada resulted in the exposure of the poster and Galloway to many times more people than there would otherwise have been.
Writing this column just before the film festival’s opening night, I’ll predict that all of the publicity generated by Greyson, Klein and company will only have served to assure full houses of moviegoers for the 10 films from Tel Aviv.
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