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“As if genocide, bombings, border closures and the degradation of the living conditions of the Gazans in Gaza, amid hunger, rats and the blocking of medicines and aid, did not continue to be perpetrated with total impunity. And indifference,’ they stress.

“As if the (often murderous) violence by settlers, the complicity of the IDF, the expulsions from Palestinian homes and land, the indiscriminate arrests, sexual violence and torture in prisons, the illegal attacks by the US and Israel in Iran and Lebanon, were not enough to say ‘enough! The show must go on. As if nothing had happened,’ reads the text.

venice4Palestine does not agree with the decision to use cinema as a tool of diplomacy to silence war crimes and crimes against humanity,” write the representatives of V4P. “The works and images of filmmakers, actresses and actors are used, often without the knowledge of the authors, as propaganda tools, to corroborate Italia’s complicity in the normalisation of relations with a government whose prime minister is accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Venice4Palestine will be a sounding board to repeat that there must be no complicity with a genocidal state’.

Recalling that ‘apartheid fell after years of a boycott campaign that began with a supermarket worker refusing to register two grapefruits from segregationist South Africa’, should the Italia government continue to be complicit, V4P calls on ‘the world of cinema, the whole of civil society, to stand up and say No’.

“It applies to weapons, it applies to products from illegal colonies, it applies to Eurovision and to agreements between universities. It applies to cinema and culture,’ they add.

With the experience of the last Venice Film Festival over, Venice4Palestine announces that it has ‘decided to focus on the Zero complicity project. In recent months, we have organised a number of round tables with film workers, particularly with the different European film collectives that have sided with Palestine and the members of pacbi/bds’.

“We have studied, reflected and gained a small but fundamental experience that makes us realise even more strongly this need to stop all forms of complicity with the government of Israel as a priority in order for our activism to bring minimal concrete results. In fact, in addition to the shameless violence of the IDF and the settlers in the West Bank, the State of Israel also determines itself through this more invisible and insidious but equally devastating violence, which acts in normalisation’.

“We will not cease to emphasise that the cinema and all culture for the State of Israel are very important tools of ìhasbaraì (the State of Israel’s official public diplomacy and communication strategy, ed.) through which the same government clears its criminal colonial policy and builds its reputation, its bogus democratic and liberal façade,” they denounce.

“This government does not use films, books, art for dialogue, but rather, in a vampire-like way, to propagandise itself as a democratic state. And, on the other hand, Israel does not want any confrontation, it only wants a large state that eliminates all traces of the Palestinians, Palestine and its culture. Starting with the case of this event, Venice4Palestine wants to investigate, with the help of experts, inside the folds of certain charges. The aim is to understand how to more incisively support all film workers who need it, not only to allow a free disassociation and a clear stance, but to offer us all the possibility of juggling with greater agility among the constraints to which we are often unwillingly subjected as authors, directors, actors, producers, distributors and cultural operators,’ they conclude.