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Film festival no place for Mideast politics: Jason Reitman
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Film festival no place for Mideast politics: Jason Reitman
AFP - Sunday, September 13
TORONTO (AFP) - - A controversy over the Toronto film festival's spotlight on Tel Aviv should be sidelined briefly "for the sake of the films," Oscar-nominated director Jason Reitman said Saturday.
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The Toronto International Film Festival chose to present 10 films on the Jewish metropolis by local filmmakers for its "City to City" program, which focuses its lens on a different city each year.
"I think a film festival should be like the Olympics: You should put arguments aside for the sake of the films," he told a press conference to promote his latest film, "Up in the Air."
Some 50 intellectuals and filmmakers, including British director Ken Loach, have accused the Toronto film festival of "complicity with the Israeli propaganda machine" over its spotlight this year on Tel Aviv, given "the absence of Palestinian filmmakers in the program."
The program "ignores the suffering of thousands of former residents and descendants of the Tel Aviv/Jaffa area who currently live in refugee camps in the Occupied Territories" after a "mass exiling of the Palestinian population" in 1948, they said in an open letter to festival organizers.
"Looking at modern, sophisticated Tel Aviv without also considering the city's past and the realities of Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza strip, would be like rhapsodizing about the beauty and elegant lifestyles in white-only Cape Town or Johannesburg during apartheid without acknowledging the corresponding black townships of Khayelitsha and Soweto."
The letter's signatories included Canadian sociologist Naomi Klein, American actress Jane Fonda and several Israeli filmmakers.
The controversy emerged when Canadian director John Greyson withdrew his film from the festival in protest.
Palestinians reportedly gathered outside the Canadian consulate in Ramallah on Thursday to call for a boycott of the film festival.
Film festival co-director Cameron Bailey launched a defense of the initiative on Friday, saying the film festival, which runs to September 19, was showcasing two films by Palestinian directors.
Bailey said he was attracted to Tel Aviv because "films being made there explore and critique the city from many different perspectives."
But "we recognize that Tel Aviv is not a simple choice and the city remains contested ground," he added.
Reitman's producer father Ivan Reitman, as well as Robert Lantos, David Cronenberg, actress Minnie Driver and Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center are said to have shown support for the Tel Aviv program, accusing its opponents of "political censorship."
Jason Reitman was nominated for an Academy Award for his film "Juno" and received critical acclaim for "Thank You For Smoking."
"Up in the Air" stars George Clooney as a man who makes a living out of firing people.
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Director Jason Reitman speaks onstage at the "Up In The Air" press conference held at the Sutton Place Hotel in Toronto, Canada. A controversy over the Toronto film festival's spotlight on Tel Aviv should be sidelined briefly "for the sake of the films," Reitman said Saturday.
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