Richard Moore 

Censorship has no place in film

Richard Moore: Chinese efforts to censor our festival overshadowed Ken Loach's equally insidious attempt to prevent sponsorship from Israel
  
  


This year's Melbourne International Film Festival was beset by attempts to censor our programme. The most celebrated effort came from the local Chinese consulate – demanding the withdrawal of the documentary 10 Conditions of Love about Rebiya Kadeer, the exiled voice of the Uighur minority. The festival's refusal to comply with this diktat produced an extraordinary response: the withdrawal of several Chinese films, hackers assaulting our website and ticketing system and waves of abusive emails, faxes and phonecalls. The Kadeer controversy overshadowed an equally insidious attempt to censor our programme by the English filmmaker Ken Loach. While the Chinese wanted to silence Kadeer, Ken Loach demanded that we refuse any cultural sponsorship from Israel.

The Israeli state has been a sponsor of the film festival for several years and is one of many cultural bodies who support our independent organisation. The list varies depending on the composition of our programme, this year our cultural partners included the British Council, the Japan Foundation, the Taipei Trade and Economic Office and the Danish Film Institute. Sponsors generally proffer financial support for their respective national cinema, and they are never granted any programming rights or any right of veto over the festival programme.

In this case the Israeli embassy in Australia offered to fund an airfare for Tatia Rosenthal, the director of the first Israeli/Australian co-production, $9.99. The funding allowed New York-based Rosenthal to introduce the Melbourne premiere along with two of its stars, Geoffrey Rush and Anthony La Paglia.

But for Loach the only question was the origin of that money. We were told that unless we rejected Israeli funding Loach would withdraw his latest film, Looking For Eric, already confirmed and printed in the official guide. This isn't the first time that Loach has pulled this stunt. Earlier this year the Edinburgh Film Festival buckled after complaints from Loach that Israel had provided £300 to fly director Tali Shalom-Ezer to the screening of her film Surrogate. The funding was withdrawn. This was a repeat of a shameful 2006 episode when Edinburgh returned a travel bursary funding flights for another Israeli director, Yoav Shamir.

This curse must not be allowed to spread to other film festivals. Politics will always walk hand in hand with film, and with film festivals, but at the core of every festival, from Melbourne to Montreal, is the independence and integrity of the programme: it is a festival's primary asset and part of an inviolate bond of trust between a festival and its audience. To allow the personal politics of one filmmaker to proscribe a festival position would not only open a veritable floodgate, but also goes against the grain of what festivals stand for. Not that I felt the need to justify ourselves but in my response to Loach, explaining why Melbourne's film festival would not comply with his demands, I reminded him that it had had a long interest in the Middle East and has programmed many films about the Israel-Palestinian question – most, if not all, sympathetic to the Palestinians.

Loach's reply was:

Film festivals will reflect many points of view, which are often radical and progressive. It is also true that there are many brutal regimes and many governments, including our own, which have committed war crimes. But the cultural boycott called for by the Palestinians means that remaining sympathetic but detached observers is no longer an option.

In other words, everyone has been given a royal dispensation from Loach to commit war crimes bar the Israelis. Far be it for me to act as an apologist for Israel but the logical extension of Loach's position is absurd. Aside from ignoring the fact that film festivals fulfil an important role in allowing filmmakers to circumvent national censors, is he saying we can continue to programme films from North Korea, from Iran, from China – but we must boycott Israel? On a moral relativity scale does that mean that Iran's treatment of women is acceptable? Should we keep quiet about how North Korea treats its citizens? Loach disagreed with George Bush's approach to foreign policy; so was it OK to programme American films during the Bush era?

Loach's demands were beyond the pale. As a supporter of independent film and filmmaking he should be ashamed of himself.

 

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