Controversy dogs TIFF's Tel Aviv spotlight

Last Updated: Thursday, September 10, 2009 | 1:59 PM ET

CBC News

Eytan Fox's The Bubble is one of the films featured in the inaugural City to City program, highlighting Tel Aviv. (Toronto International Film Festival)

The Toronto International Film Festival wanted to give its audience a taste of a current urban filmmaking hotspot with its new City to City program, but the controversy that's emerged over the organizers' inaugural choice — Tel Aviv — has instead stolen some of the shine from the annual event.

Born from a former TIFF program that focused on a new country each year, City to City was envisioned as a way to delve specifically into urban locales where "there's a kind of a crest of interesting new filmmaking happening," festival co-director Cameron Bailey told CBC News in late August, as the festival approached.

"There has to be something exciting going on in the film scene and these have to be films that are somehow plugged into what the culture, the politics and the social life of the city are."

Days later, Canadian filmmaker John Greyson withdrew his documentary short film Covered (about violent reaction to the first queer cultural festival in Sarajevo) from TIFF and published an open letter outlining his protest of the Tel Aviv showcase.

A growing group of artists, activists and intellectuals — including Greyson, Naomi Klein, David Byrne, Ken Loach and Jane Fonda — escalated the dispute by circulating a letter denouncing the TIFF program as being subverted by "the Israeli propaganda machine."

"A year ago, the consul general of Israel announced that there would be a Brand Israel project — that Israel needed to have a new face … to have us look at Israel differently. In fact, it is really an attempt to deny what Israel is doing around occupation and, since then, the massacres in Gaza," Israeli-born, Toronto-based filmmaker b.h. Yael, one of the protest organizers, told CBC News on Thursday as TIFF got underway.

"We are saying it’s really inappropriate to have a spotlight on Tel Aviv," she said, adding that the letter has exceeded 1,000 signatories.

"I don’t think we doubt that there was some kind of independence of selection [of the films].…We’re focusing on the fact that TIFF has become part of this propaganda attempt, this whitewash."

The protesters are also planning to hold a news conference on Monday to answer questions about their campaign and unveil messages from several of their prominent members.

Although those who have signed the letter — including Israeli filmmakers, Yael pointed out — are not calling for a boycott of the festival nor of the 10 films featured in the program, others are.

A group of Palestinian journalists and filmmakers gathered outside of the Canadian consular office in Ramallah Thursday to call for a boycott of TIFF.

Bailey, a former film critic and longtime programmer, denies any outside involvement in how City to City was conceived and curated. In an open response letter, Bailey acknowledged that Tel Aviv was "not a simple choice and that the city remains contested ground."

"We wanted to go to cities where the filmmakers there were doing really strong work that would reflect some of the complexity of the situation on the ground, where they live," Bailey explained on CBC Radio Thursday morning, noting also that the program includes directors who are quite critical of their own government.

"We thought this would really give our audience in Toronto a much closer look, a more detailed look at the culture of the city and some of the cracks in the society there."

'Debate, dialogue, that’s completely fine to us. We like it better, though, when people see the films and have the debate after.'—TIFF co-director Cameron Bailey

The festival is not interested in "whipping up controversy," but in dialogue, Bailey said.

"We like when people get interested and excited about what we’re showing and start having conversations about those films. Start having differences of opinion. Debate, dialogue, that’s completely fine to us. We like it better, though, when people see the films and have the debate after."