Almost everything was ready. The program was finalized, and invitations sent out to some 250 professionals – filmmakers, actors and producers – from all over the Mediterranean basin. There were just a few details to be ironed out, as is the case before every edition of Cinemed, the festival which, for 45 years in Montpellier, has been showcasing the Mediterranean powder keg, its solidarities and its disparities.
And then terror struck in the early hours of October 7, first in Israel, then in Palestine. Film events were canceled one after the other, in Egypt, Qatar and Tunisia. Cinemed teams thought hard, as Israeli and Palestinian guests dropped out. Some preferred to look after their loved ones. Others mourned their loss. Israeli filmmaker Shaylee Atary, whose short film Single Light was selected, lost her husband, Yahav Winner. Also a filmmaker, he was killed by a Hamas terrorist while defending their home on the Kfar Aza kibbutz. Wasn't still holding the festival, scheduled from October 20 to 28, derisory, even indecent?
"We hesitated. Then we said to ourselves, 'If we don't show these works, who will?'" said director Christophe Leparc, justifying his decision to go ahead in spite of everything. On opening night, two video messages were broadcast. The first was sent by Israeli filmmaker Dani Rosenberg, 44, whose second feature, The Vanishing Soldier, is in competition. The second featured a well-known figure in Palestinian cinema, the actor and director Mohammad Bakri, 69, to whom a retrospective is dedicated, together with one of his sons, the actor Saleh Bakri, 46.
From one video to the next, the faces betrayed the same dejection. Rosenberg stayed with his family in Tel Aviv. On October 7, he had just landed in South Korea to attend the Busan International Film Festival. The on-the-spot screening of The Vanishing Soldier, which follows the escape of an Israeli soldier fleeing Gaza to join his lover in Tel Aviv, was "a frightening experience," he said, given the film's resonance with current events. "We shot on the Gaza border, and the soldier character, Shlomi [Ido Tako], arrives in Israel through the Zikim base, one of the points through which Hamas entered Israel, on October 7. Then Shlomi passes through a village that was attacked. It's as if my film was crashing into the walls of reality."
Rosenberg is thinking of the "Palestinian victims, who should not have to pay the price of this war." He didn't mince his words against the current Israeli leadership: "Freeing the hostages is not their priority, they only talk about revenge. This is a serious mistake. They strengthened Hamas at the expense of Fatah to divide the Palestinians and kill the dream of a two-state solution. They didn't protect us during the October 7 attacks." The filmmaker is still reeling from the footage on social media. "Hamas broadcast videos of burnt houses, pregnant women with open stomachs and decapitated children. It's like an attack on the mind." He teaches cinema in Jerusalem and feels helpless in the face of this material, which is at the heart of his profession. "We're faced with an overflow of images, which prevents us from understanding what's happening."
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