[Reader-list] Filmmakers, festivals under attack

[Jeebesh]

Filmmakers, festivals under attack
Deborah Kaufman
San Francisco Chronicle
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.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/08/23/INAQ19AH9I.DTL