FINN DANIELS-YEOMANS

The modest aim of this essay is to draw attention to the recent proliferation of pro-Palestinian documentaries engaging with the history and present of Israel’s genocidal war in the region, focussing in particularly on how such films are being de facto censored by screen industry organisations such as film festivals. While there has been a well-documented policing of criticism of Israel’s accelerated military operations in Gaza and the West Bank and a concomitant supressing of pro-Palestinian solidarity by Western political and media establishments, somewhat surprising is the extent to which this suppression is being reproduced across cultural institutions and prominent film festivals in particular. In what follows I trace the pattern of suppression such festivals have contributed to since October 7 2023, reflecting on what this tells us about the assumed and actual roles these institutions play as putatively progressive or oppositional spaces with a long-standing record of facilitating urgent political encounters and debate. Animating my concerns are what this pattern reveals about the current formation of film festivals when it comes to Western institutional complicity in the genocide in Palestine.

I am writing this in August 2025 from the UK, and on a weekend of peaceful protests against the UK government’s decision to prescribe the pro-Palestinian non-violent action group Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation after members of the network vandalised Royal Air Force aircraft at Brize Norton, damaging planes directly used to support Israeli’s genocidal military operations in Palestine. The unprecedented prescription makes it a criminal offence to express support for the group, with such conduct punishable under terrorist legislation of a maximum fourteen year prison sentence. Over 900 individuals have been arrested for showing support to Palestine Action, the majority of whom in a non-violent sit-in on Parliament Square on 9 August 2025.

This includes an 89-year old woman and a blind man in a wheel chair, all for holding placards that state “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action”. This draconian and highly selective clamp down on civic freedom by the British government signals what political commentator Grace Blakely describes as Britain’s recent ‘descen[sion] into censorship, brutality, and authoritarianism, all in the name of providing diplomatic cover for a genocidal regime’.^{[1]Grace Blakeley. 2025. “This Weekend, We Saw the UK Descend Into Censorship, Brutality, and Authoritarianism”. Zeteo. August 11 2025.}

On this same weekend it was reported that five Al Jazeera journalists had been murdered by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) in a widely-condemned targeted strike on their tent in Gaza City. Al Jazeera has demarcated the killing of its correspondents as ‘yet another blatant and premeditated attack on press freedom’ in Palestine; with international media outlets banned from the territory, Anas Al Sharif and his colleagues were among the last remaining voices reporting from inside Gaza, and thus targeted because of their vital work in systematically exposing Israel’s genocidal acts that would otherwise go undocumented.^{[2]Al Jazeera. 2025. “Al Jazeera condemns killing of its journalists by Israeli forces in Gaza”.}

Despite the deliberate killing of media workers being a war crime, Al Sharif’s murder was “justified” by the IDF’s “Legitimisation Cell” via the unsupported claim that he was a current Hamas leader.^{[3]See Harriet Williamson. 2025. “Israel Has a Secret Military Unit That Smears Palestinian Journalists”. Novara Media.} As a key part of Israel’s wider project of ‘alethocide’ (the systemic destruction of truth), the Legitimisation Cell is an Israeli intelligence group established in the wake of October 7 whose primary function is to manufacture consent for the IDF by providing falsifying narratives that vindicate Israel’s most deplorable military actions in Gaza and the West Bank, which is by no means limited to the targeted killing of journalists.^{[4]Marc Own Jones. 2025. “Evidencing alethocide: Israel’s war on truth in Gaza”. Third World Quarterly [online].}

While it is to be expected that the propaganda wing of the Israeli state might circulate fabricted accounts of the horrific atrocities it is committing in Gaza, perhaps less anticipated is the extent to which mainstream Western media outlets have towed the line. Underlining the complicity in the coverage of Western journalism, Novara Media’s Steven Methven writes the following:

The role of the media in covering one of the most one-sided, destructive and grotesque assaults in recent memory hasn’t simply been to conceal its excesses from its audience (though maintaining political docility has certainly seemed an imperative). Rather, by careful framing, selective omission and the strategic deployment of a sheen of ‘objectivity’, … outlet after outlet has made itself a strategic asset, both for Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocidal regime, and for the western powers urgently seeking to maintain the status quo in the region.^{[5]Steven Methven. 2025. “How the Media Became a Weapon in the Gaza Genocide”. Novara Media.}

Examples abound: from the widespread use of a passive voice when reporting on mass killings of Palestinians (who die and are not killed) to obfuscating reports that negate the history of Israeli occupation and apartheid to the persistent casting of Palestinians as either terrorists or victims of a humanitarian catastrophe, the former working to sanction Israel’s genocidal war and the latter absolving them from accountability. These are but some examples of what Edward Said once termed the ‘disciplinary communications apparatus’ that has long laboured to galvanise pro-Israeli and anti-Arab sentiment among Western publics.^{[6]Edward Said. 1984. “Permission to Narrate”. Journal of Palestine Studies. 13(3): 30.} Indictive, also, of what Dina Matar describes as Western legcy media’s ‘epistemic “war” against Palestinians’, the hypocrisy, callousness and selective inaccuracy in this reporting has served to dehumanise Palestinian life, to trivialise Palestinian suffering, to mask Western genocidal complicity in that suffering, and to silence, delegitimise and otherwise censor those speaking on behalf of the Palestinian cause, especially Palestinians themselves.^{[7]Dina Matar. 2025. “Habitual media: interrogating Western legacy media’s complicity in the epistemic ‘war’ against Palestinians”. Third World Quarterly [Online]. 1-13.}

More surprising still is how this ‘disciplinary communications apparatus’ and its current forms of selective suppression have invaded cultural institutions across the Global North, with screen industry organisations such as film festivals seemingly aligning themselves with the Western media and political classes’ both blatant and covert censoring of pro-Palestinian sentiment. Despite emerging in 1930s fascist Italy, film festivals have a long held reputation as a generally liberal institution for the promotion of artistic and political freedom of expression. Described as ‘a unique space for artistic and cultural exchange where provocative artistic and political films are screened’, such festivals have long functioned as a platform for the exhibiting of political and counter-cultural cinema, are no stranger to acts of protest, and have a longstanding history of facilitating public debates around divisive and pressing socio-cultural and geopolitical issues.^{[8]David Archibald and Mitchell Miller. 2011. “From Rennes to Toronto: anatomy of a boycott”. Screen 52(2): 279.} When it comes to the post-October 7 context of Palestine and Israel, however, this reputation has been stretched to breaking point. Marked by last minute cancellations of pro-Palestinian films, vocal backlashes against the screening of others, the boycotting of venues and thinly-veiled threats of the withdrawal of funding for organisations expressing any sentiment of Palestinian solidarity, the past two years have been a tumultuous time for many of these institutions, with censorship-related scandals erupting from Amsterdam to Montreal, Cannes to Berlin.

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Much of this started with accusations of political censorship directed at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) and its response to the pro-Palestinian protests at the opening ceremony of its 2023 edition, which took place in the immediate aftermath of October 7. Eighteen filmmakers, many Palestinian, withdrew their films following a festival statement that condemned protesters for using a “from the river to the sea” banner to express their opposition to the then already thousands of civilian killings in Gaza. The Palestine Film Institute and advocacy group Workers for Palestine Netherlands also criticizedthe IDFA’s belated call for a ceasefire, writing in a group statement that ‘we, as programmers, filmmakers, and audience members, assert our refusal to collaborate with a festival engaged in institutional violence and censorship’.^{[9]The full statement can be found at the following website: palestinefilminstitute.} While the IDFA has tended to be a platform for the promotion of Palestinian films and political filmmaking more generally, the political turmoil that ensued as a result of these events has ramified across the festival circuit ever since.

Such turmoil came to a head at Berlin International Film Festival in 2024 during the fevered backlash against the acceptance speeches given by Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham, two members of the Palestinian-Israeli collective behind No Other Land (Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham & Rachel Szor, Palestine/Norway, 2024), a film that documents the violent forced displacement of Palestinian communities in the Masafer Yatta are of the occupied West Bank. Upon accepting the Berlinale Documentary Film Award and Panorama Audience Award for Best Documentary Film, Abraham called for the end of apartheid rule in the occupied West Bank and a ceasefire in Gaza while Adra expressed difficulty in celebrating the award when thousands of Palestinians were being ‘slaughtered and massacred by Israel’, before asking Germany ‘to respect the UN calls and stop sending weapons to Israel’.^{[10] Watch the speeches the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZBbOBPLSvA&t=6s.} Senior political figures were quick to shield Israel from criticism by mischaracterising these statements as anti-Semitic: Berlin’s conservative Mayor, Kai Wegnor, condemned them as ‘intolerable relativisation’, Germany’s commissioner for culture, Claudio Roth, suggested that they expressed a ‘deep hatred of Israel’ and insisted that her applause at the event was only directed Abraham and not Adra, and the Free Democratic Party demanded that state funding for the festival be withdrawn.^{[11]Philip Oltermann. 2024. “German minister says she clapped Israeli film-maker, not his Palestinian colleague, at Berlinale”. The Guardian (UK).} While Adra and Abraham received a violent backlash for their speeches, including death threats, the festival distanced itself from their remarks, with the 2025 edition of the event also characterised by attempts to stifle pro-Palestinian dissent.^{[12]See Nathaniel Flakin. 2025. “Berlinale 2025: An Embarrassing Festival of Self-Censorship”. Left Voice.}

Marking No Other Land as a divisive film, the fevered reaction to Abraham and Adra’s relatively muted comments has impacted the film’s distribution. No major US distributor has taken on the project, an anomaly for a film with such critical recognition and so many high profile accolades, including the 2024 Oscar for Best Documentary Film. Festival awards are typically the primer for a widespread release; bestowing prestige and recognition on films that receive them, they serve as a ‘hall-mark of quality’ and are key to the symbolic capital and ‘cultural legitimization’ (among other value adding processes) that festivals give to films and their makers.^{[13] Marijke de Valck. 2016. “Fostering art, adding value, cultivating taste: film festivals as sites of cultural legitimization”. In Marijke de Valck et al., eds. Film Festivals: History, Theory, Method, Practice. Routledge. p. 105.} Seen as such, Abraham’s designation of the reticence among major US distributors as ‘completely political’ seems accurate, with aversion to the film primarily due to its critical examination of Israel’s annexation of the West Bank rather than its artistic merit or commercial potential.^{[14]In Nick Vivarelli. 2025. “‘No Other Land’s’ Palestinian and Israeli Directors on Why U.S. Distributors Won’t Touch Their Doc: It’s ‘Completely Political’”. Variety.} And while No Other Land was eventually released independently, with an extended run of screenings across the US (its 14 sold out screenings at the Lincoln Centre in New York indicative of audience desire to see the film), this is a far cry from the potential audience reach of a major distribution deal with a mainstream streaming platform. All of which is to say that the No Other Land has had a high level of visibility, partially because of the controversy that has followed it, but with a limited access to viewers, with the film’s polarised reception overshadowing the on-the-ground realities in a manner consistent with the ambitions of those who want criticism of Israel muted.

One lesson to be gleaned from the film’s extra-textual life is the circulatory nature in which the censoring of pro-Palestinian documentaries unfolds: the heightened (or indeed hysterical) reaction to a given film brands that film as divisive, foiling its chances of widespread distribution. Any subsequent screening is then perceived as a political intervention, with the likely backlash that ensues fuelling the film’s status as divisive. This was the case with No Other Land, when a set of screenings slated to take place at Miami City’s independent O Cinema following its Oscar success in March 2025 was put in jeopardy when the city’s mayor, Steven Meiner, threatened to defund and evict the independent venue on the grounds that the film was ‘a one-sided propaganda attack on the Jewish people’.^{[15]Natalia Keogan. 2025. “Miami Beach’s O Cinema Challenges Mayor’s Threats of Eviction Over ‘No Other Land’ Screenings”. Documentary Magazine.} While O Cinema’s board eventually refused and the screenings went ahead (and were sold out, somewhat ironically fuelled by Meiner’s actions), other festivals, venues, distributors and broadcasters have not displayed the same commitment to the showing of this and other pro-Palestine films, fearing the consequences of doing so.

As has been widely discussed in industry press, documentary’scontemporary landscape is dominated by an economy of risk-aversion wherein films deemed polemical are to be avoided, a sentiment especially true of those sympathetic to Palestine; as Anthony Kaufman details, No Other Land is but the most high profile case of a film’s distribution being stifled because of its critical stance towards Israel.^{[16]Anthony Kauffman. 2025. “No Other Distribution: How Film Industry Economics and Politics Are Suppressing Docs Sympathetic to Palestine and Critical of Israel”. Documentary Magazine.} Others include The Bibi Files (Alexis Bloom, US, 2024), which has not picked up U.S. distribution seemingly for its critical portrayal of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) refusing to air it unless edits were made.

The BBC was also embroiled in scandal when senior figures from the cultural world accused it of censoring Palestinian voices after refusing to broadcast Gaza: Doctors Under Attack (Kerim Shah, UK, 2025), a documentary on Israel’s military attacks on hospitals in Gaza and alleged abuse of healthcare workers. This followed a similar campaign condemning the pulling of Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone (Jamie Roberts & Yousef Hammash, UK, 2025), which the BBC removed from its iPlayer streaming service after the ‘intervention of partisan political actors’, namely pro-Israeli lobbyists, complained that the film’s teenage narrator was the son of a Hamas official.^{[17]The letter can be found on the Artists for Palestine website: artistsforpalestine. The man in question is Ayman Al-Yazouri, a deputy minister of agriculture for the Hamas-run government of Gaza.}

And Netflix removed many of the 32-film package called “Palestinian Stories” that was launched in 2021. Inadvertent or not, Palestinian films and pro-Palestine narratives have decreased across exhibition spaces and media platforms in a pattern of suppression that, while certainty not new, has seemingly worsened over the past two years.^{[18]See Kauffman (2025) for more on this.}

With No Other Land, there has also been a revealing debate about the film’s Israeli-Palestinian co-production and the implications that this has had for its critical success. At the centre of this is Adra and Abraham’s on screen relationship, which has been both celebrated among liberal commentators, on one hand, for exemplifying a co-operative union between occupier and occupied and a blueprint of sorts for a peaceful future in the region, and admonished, on the other, for normalising relations with a genocidal colonial state and inadvertently sanctioning a genocidal status quo – this last present in the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel’s (PACBI) call to boycott the film because it is an Israeli co-production.^{[19]The PACBI’s statement on how No Other Land violates the BDS movement’s anti-normalization guidelines is available here: bdsmovement} Referring to Abrahams pronounced contributions to the film, Mary Turfah also argues that No Other Land indulges in a kind of wishful thinking that is ‘committed to the possibility of a future that accommodates both settler and native’; No Other Land’s overt condemnation of Israel’s illegal occupation in the West Bank leaves the colonial ideology of Zionism intact, Turfah suggests, with the film peddling a narrative of settler redemption in which there is a future where Zionism and Palestine can both exist despite presenting ample evidence of the former’s efforts to eradicate the latter. For all the film’s merits, and to bring this back to the issue of censorship, one might speculative that No Other Land would not have received such critical acclaim and high profile exposure were it not an Israeli collaboration with an Israeli co-protagonist, if it did not assuage its critique of Zionism, and were its redemption narrative not so accommodating to what Turfah describes as ‘the liberal’s long-sought-after Roadmap for Peace’.^{[20] Mary Turfah. 2025. “No Other Land” for Whom?”. MUBI.} As Sarah Agha also notes: ‘It is almost undeniable that the participation of Israeli co-directors makes the documentary more palatable to [festival] programmers who might otherwise have been apprehensive about accusations of bias, partiality or worse’.^{[21]Sarah Agha. 2025. “The Palestinian cause has won an Oscar for telling the truth about Israel’s apartheid”. The New Arab.}

The film festival world’s specific aversion to Palestinian-made films about Palestine inferred in Agha’s remarks is rendered explicit when we consider the Cannes Film Festival thoroughly selective treatment of From Ground Zero (Palestine, 2024), a remarkable and uniquely powerful anthology of shorts made by 22 Palestinian filmmakers living in the midst of the current war in Gaza. Instigated by Gazan-born filmmaker Rashid Masharawi, the film’s initial invitation to premiere at Cannes was rescinded on political grounds, with festival director Thierry Frémaux adopting the ostrich-like stance that the 2024 edition will be ‘a festival without polemics’.^{[22]Elsa Keslassy and Ellise Shafer. 2024. “Thierry Fremaux Responds to Rumors of #MeToo Reckoning at Cannes: These ‘Polemics Don’t Concern’ the Festival”. Variety.} As with the notion of the apolitical festival itself, the framing of Cannes as somehow beyond politics is as tenuous as it is implausible given the number of other explicitly political films screened in 2024 – not least the Palme d’Or nominated and Special Jury Prize winning The Seed of the Sacred Fig (Germany/Iran/France, 2024), a political drama about unrest in Tehran for which its now-exiled Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof received an eight year prison sentence from the Iranian government. The decision to omit From Ground Zero is not, it seems, driven by an aversion to politics tout court but to the specific political realities depicted in the collection, and to the perceived political fallout of screening a film made by and about Gazans in the post-October 7 environment. As Masharawi speculates, Cannes ‘did not want to deal with the tension and sensitivities around this subject’.^{[23]Sebastian Shehadi. 2025. “How do you make an Oscar-shortlisted film in Gaza during a genocide? Palestinian director Rashid Masharawi explains”. The New Arab.}

Far from a festival without politics, on display in Cannes’ treatment of From Ground Zero is the ‘politics of selection’ that informs the formation of any given festival programme.^{[24]Janet Staiger. 1985. “The Politics of Film Canons”. Cinema Journal 24(3): 5.} Apparent in proclamations such as ‘Cannes … can kill your picture’, major festivals function as cultural gatekeepers and political tastemakers by ascribing the very small number of works they showcase with value, prestige and attention.^{[25]Kenneth Turan 2002. Sundance to Sarajevo. Film Festivals and the World They Made. University of California Press. p. 23.} Programming decisions shape the political and not only cultural landscape, in other words, imbuing certain political realities with priority and legitimacy while casting others into the shadows of our collective political imaginary. Writing of the ‘constructed silence’ that many film festivals have consecrated in their reticence to screen Palestinian films, Mauro Lukasievicz indeed calls on programmers to stop abdicating their responsibility when it comes to Palestine: ‘Programming films about Palestine today is the bare minimum if we want to live up to the moment’, he writes, and this means ‘creating a space for friction … questions, discomfort, and debate’.^{[26] Mauro Lukasievicz. 2025. “The Absence of Gaza at BAFICI and Mar del Plata: A Silence That Challenges”. CALIGARI.} Unperturbed by Cannes’ decision and unwilling to let the film be banished to the cemetery of cinema history, Masharawi created such a space when he organized a protest screening of the film just outside Cannes’ festival premises. ‘I will not allow the festival to decide that we do not exist and to exclude our voices’, Masharawi explains. ‘If Cannes did not want to go to Gaza, Gaza had to go to Cannes’.^{[27] In Shehadi (2025).} The film has subsequently premiered elsewhere and is being distributed independently, by Cosmic Cat in the UK and Watermelon Pictures in the US – the latter an independent distribution company committed to the amplification of voices from Palestine and other marginalized communities.^{[28]To be sure, it is not only Cannes that did not want to ‘go to Gaza’, its deselection of From Ground Zero indicative of other high profile festivals’ aversion to programming work by Palestinian filmmakers. Mauro Lukasievicz (2025) details some of these.}

Without suggesting an equivalence, the de facto censoring at play in festivals’ aversion to programming work by Palestinian filmmakers is not logically distinct from the processes of cultural and historical erasure – the ‘culturicide’, ‘epistemicide’ and ‘scholasticide’ – that are constitutive of Israel’s genocidal project in Palestine, elements of which are brought to the surface in From Ground Zero and other recent pro-Palestine documentaries.^{[29]These terms refer to the systematic destruction of Palestinian structures of knowledge, education institutions, and cultural figures and infrastructures. See Dina Matar (2025) for more.} With even the most overtly fictional entries indexing a scale of loss and devastation beyond any description I can provide here, From Ground Zero provides intimate and frequently unbearable glimpses into the physical and emotional destruction of living under conditions of a genocidal war.

Decimation is pervasive and ever-present, with the ruinous aftermaths of very recent acts of violence compounded by the imminent threat of others, this latter registered in the constant whirring of military drones or when, in Soft Skins, children’s names are written on their bodies so they can be identified if they are killed.

While bearing witness to life within a genocidal siege, the films are by no means solely about annihilation. Pledged as ‘stories that capture the unyielding steadfastness of the human spirit and enduring creativity that thrives even in the face of relentless devastation’, the collection serves as a document of erasure as well as a meditation on the indelible power of culture during erasure, its very existence an act of resistance against the forces of eradication that the films so forcefully bring into view.

This is emblematised perhaps most clearly in Muhammad Al Sharif’s lamenting Sorry Cinema. With cinemas in Gaza destroyed and his burgeoning career as a filmmaker eclipsed by the imperative to survive, Sorry Cinema is a rueful mediation on the abandonment of filmmaking during war and a forewarning of a Gazan future without its filmmakers. The film ends with a foreboding scenario of a clapperboard being burned for firewood, the literal destruction of the cinematic apparatus symbolic of Israel’s culturicidal effort to annihilate Palestine’s film culture along with its people, with Sorry Cinema tantamount to a repudiation of that effort. Cannes’ refusal to ‘go to Gaza’ and the constructed silence that it and other festivals enact in that refusal indirectly abet the acts of genocidal erasure that Sorry Cinema and From Ground Zero as a whole evidence and resist. The unrelenting bravery and fortitude displayed by the besieged filmmakers in bringing these vital films into being is in stark contrast to the ostrich-like cowardice of Cannes’ decision-makers not to programme them.^{[30]My thanks to Camille Baier for the generous and extremely helpful insights she provided about attempts to censor From Ground Zero, as well as her role as Outreach Coordinator for the film’s independent UK distribution.}

A related and perhaps more complex issue when it comes to debates about the politics of censorship at film festivals concerns the question of boycotts and the indirect effects these have on the curtailing of Palestinian solidarity in films made by Israeli filmmakers. A case in point is the much-discussed cancellation of Rule of Stone (Canada, 2024), directed by Israeli-Canadian Danae Elon, at the 2024 Montréal International Documentary Festival (RIDM). Sharing its title with a law mandating the use of Jerusalem stone for new buildings, Rule of Stone is explicit in its criticism of Israeli occupation, scrutinising the invisible violence that architectural and urban planning policies have played in implementing and normalising Israel’s settler colonial annexation of East Jerusalem since the 1967 Six-Day War. Elon withdrew the film from its slated screening at RIDM because it was partly financed by the Makor Foundation for Israeli Films, which is supported by Israel’s Ministry of Culture and Sport, and so in breach of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI). The campaign stipulates a boycott of Israeli cultural institutions because they are ‘part and parcel of the ideological and institutional scaffolding of Israel’s regime of occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid against the Palestinian people’. The boycott guidelines emphasize that ‘a cultural product’s content or artistic merit is not relevant in determining whether or not it is boycottable’.^{[31]The guidelines are available at the following website: bdsmovement. For a film that examines the importance of boycotts in the context of Israel and Palestine, see the 2021 documentary Boycott (Julia Bacha, US, 2021).}

Cultural boycotts do of course have clear political value, with the recent call to boycott the distributor MUBI for taking a $100m investment from Sequoia Capital, a firm with direct ties to the Israeli military, important in bringing the screen industry’s institutional complicity in genocidal-profiteering to public attention.^{[32]Sequoia Capital invested seed money in Kela Technologies, an Israeli defence-tech start up founded by four Israeli veterans and which supplies the IDF, with signatories of the boycott protesting that ‘Mubi’s financial growth as a company is now explicitly tied to the genocide in Gaza’.}

Elon’s act of conscientious self-censorship, however, does bring renewed scrutiny to how BDS campaigns risk stifling the circulation of films intending to amplify the Palestinian cause.

Reflecting on such issues in their revealing dissection of the wave of boycotts in the 2009 film festival circuit following Israel’s widely condemned invasion of Gaza in December 2008, David Archibald and Mitchell Miller ask the following: ‘[S]hould film festivals be outside of boycott politics? … [W]ho decides what gets boycotted, and what are the limits of boycotts? … Where is the line drawn, and how can a morally consistent argument be constructed?’^{[33]2011. “From Rennes to Toronto”. 279.} While I fully recognise the inherent problem of normalisation and other forms of cultural whitewashing, it is also worth asking if the boycotting of films like Rule of Stone and No Other Land does not further entrench the suppression of pro-Palestinian perspectives in ways that primarily serve the Israel government and pro-Zionist organisations’ desire to have criticism of Israel suppressed? Does de-platforming pro-Palestinian documentaries on such grounds not ultimately limit opportunities for audiences to experience such films and to debate their limitations (including their funding) in the uniquely charged context that the live festival environment provides? Commenting on how boycott politics risk diluting the festival’s capacity to facilitate such debates, Dorit Naaman notes that Elon’s film had effectively been ‘silenced’ and that this silencing ‘signalled … that these festivals are not brave spaces to have difficult and necessary conversations’.^{[34]Dorit Naaman. 2024. “Cancellations at Canadian film festivals raise questions about accountability”. The Conversation.}

All of these questions ultimately revolve around the issue of what is lost when the chance to see a given film are denied or delayed and the closing down of artistic and political possibility that this signals. Putting to one side debates about the efficacy of boycotts and reservations about documentary’s capacity to meaningfully respond to situations as troubling as Gaza, films such as No Other Land, From Ground Zero, Rule of Stone and others make potentially important interventions in their accounts of the ongoing genocide in Palestine, interventions whose scope and scale are diminished when such films – for whatever reason – do not get screened and seen. Oriented by a different politics and distinct from the thinly-veiled censorship on display in Cannes’ treatment of From Ground Zero or the backlash against No Other Land, the more complex form of de-platforming at play in the boycotting of a film such as Rule of Stone does nevertheless compound the pattern of suppressing pro-Palestinian perspectives traced above. Whether bare-faced, inadvertent or self-imposed, and whether due to boycotts, de-platforming, curtailed distribution or not being programmed in the first place, the censoring of (pro)Palestinian documentaries by prominent film festivals and other industry organisations that has proliferated since October 7 speaks to a troubling (if not that surprising) continuation between such institutions and the more widespread crackdown on pro-Palestine solidarity. The general reticence of such festivals to ‘go to Gaza’ indexes the impotency and complicitous timidity not of pro-Palestinian films and filmmakers but of the institutions that exist to support them.