✔️ 2022-12-08 05:30:00 – Paris/France.
The Jordanian Oscar nominee had never mattered in Israel until her arrival farha. Darin J. Sallam's feature debut angered the neighboring country for including a sequence in which Israeli soldiers murder a Palestinian family in 1948, including a baby. The government has already taken steps to withdraw subsidies from the only center that broadcast it in the country (Al Saraya, an Arab theater in the city of Yaffa, annexed to Tel Aviv) and several Israelis are announcing this these days. ci on social networks that they canceled their subscription to Netflix for including it in the catalog.
The feature film tells the story of a Palestinian teenager locked in a room by her father to protect her when the first Arab-Israeli war breaks out. Through a crack, he sees the family massacre. Both the trailer and the poster emphasize that the tape is inspired by real events. Specifically, a story that a Palestinian refugee in Syria told her mother, as the director explains.
The film, shot in Jordan and featuring two Swedish co-producers, was released last year at the Toronto International Film Festival and went to Busan (South Korea) or Malmö, Sweden; and the Red Sea, in Saudi Arabia, dedicated to Arab cinema. However, the controversy only erupted last week, when we learned that it would be screened in Israel and that it would be part of the Netflix catalog, where we can see it since the 1st of the last.
“Farha” director Darin J. Sallam last December at the Red Sea Festival in the Saudi city of Jeddah. Tim P. Whitby (Getty)
It was then that Finance Minister Avigdor Lieberman announced the start of procedures to withdraw Al Saraya's subsidies for giving space to a feature film "full of incitement [a la violencia], falsehoods and lies against Israeli soldiers”. And he considered it "crazy that Netflix decides to show a film whose sole purpose is to create a pretext and incite against the Israeli soldiers". "The vilification of Israeli soldiers and security forces who work day and night to defend and protect all of their citizens and residents has no place," said Lieberman, set to leave office after Benjamin's election victory. Netanyahu last year, who is currently negotiating the formation of the most right-wing coalition government in the country's history.
In the same vein, the head of Culture, Jili Tropper, spoke, deeming it "regrettable" that "an Israeli theater lends its stage to lies and slander", asked the officials of Al Saraya to cancel the screening and urged Finance to “review the issue of the grant from this institution. Based on “journalistic information,” the minister pointed out that the film “includes defamation against Israeli soldiers and depicts the massacre of a family amid comparisons to Nazi behavior during the Holocaust.” Btsalmo, an ultra-nationalist NGO which has among its objectives the fight against the boycott and the "delegitimization of Israel", had previously asked the two ministers to prevent the passage.
Contacted by this newspaper, the theater sent a press release in which it underlined its "right to artistic creativity and expression" and its commitment, "now more than ever", to defend it. “Our response to the incitement against us was to go ahead and present the film on the same date and time [el pasado día 30] that was originally scheduled,” he clarifies. Photos of the small Ottoman-era hall filled with spectators during the screening can be seen on the Facebook page of Al Saraya, which produces and hosts cultural events focused on the concerns of the Arab minority in Israel. Netflix declined to comment on the controversy.
Subscriptions
The battle is also taking place on other fronts. One is Netflix subscriptions. Several Israelis announced on the networks that they unsubscribed due to the inclusion of farha. Among them, the model Natali Dadon, with the message: “Values before luxury! ".
Another is the famous internet movie archive IMDb, one of the most important pages in the sector, in which the score of farha it went from 7,2 to 5,8 within hours the day it premiered on Netflix. Pro-Palestinian activists online linked decline to coordinated farm action robots. This Wednesday, the tape posted an 8,6 and the distribution of the notes revealed how little the cinematographic quality influenced the appreciation: 84,2% of the users granted it 10 points and 12,3%, one. Only 3,5% of reviews fall between the maximum and the minimum.
The director and producers, Deema Azar and Ayah Jardaneh, released a joint statement last Saturday in response to the "aggressive attacks" on the film. They pointed out that they started just before the Netflix screening with "the clear goal of damaging" the film and "preventing it from being seen around the world", and they insisted that They would persevere in their goal of "spreading the film and the story". he tells the audience. audiences around the world. “These attempts to silence our voices as Arab/Semitic women and filmmakers to dehumanize us and prevent us from telling our stories, our narrative and our truth run counter to freedom of expression. The film exists, we exist and they will not silence us,” they stressed.
The controversy shows how, nearly 75 years later, Israel's founding wound is still bleeding. The account of what happened in 1948 fundamentally divides Israelis and Palestinians. For the former, it was the year the Jews finally established their state, shortly after the Holocaust and after centuries of persecution and anti-Semitism. The Arab countries tried to prevent it by launching a war, but they lost it. For the Palestinians, it is rather the Nakba (the catastrophe), a plan of ethnic cleansing initiated a year earlier by the Jewish militias in which approximately two thirds of the Palestinian population (approximately 700 people) fled or were expelled from their homes. . Today, they and their descendants number millions of refugees, mainly in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.
The feature film, shot in Arabic, will not be subtitled in Hebrew. No more than the majority of Netflix subscribers in Israel, those who have the interface in Hebrew. Only those who have configured it in English or Arabic will be able to do so.
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SOURCE: Reviews News
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