Protesters outside the Venice Film Festival’s main building on Wednesday held banners reading “Free Palestine” and “Stop the Genocide,” hours before stars were to walk its red carpet.
Around 20 people from a regional left-wing Italian political collective held up the hand-drawn banner and Palestinian flags ahead of the opening ceremony later Wednesday.
“We need to use the attention here during the film festival to shift the focus onto Palestine,” Giulia Cacopardo, 28, from the North-East Social Centres, told AFP.
“We hope that other people are going to join us to stop the genocide now,” she said, employing a characterization strongly rejected by Jerusalem of Israel’s campaign against the Hamas terror group in the Gaza Strip. Israel says it doesn’t targets civilians, and fights in accordance with international law.
The Wednesday protest was a prelude to a much larger demonstration planned at the weekend in Venice by hundreds of local groups, with many Italian film insiders also pushing for the festival to take a stronger stance on the war, which began when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists invaded Israel on October 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages.
The war also drew attention at the Cannes festival in May, when hundreds of movie figures signed a petition saying they were “ashamed” of their industry’s “passivity” about the war.
An open letter published on Saturday in Italy was signed by hundreds of Italian cinema professionals under the banner of the Venice4Palestine (V4P) group, which asserted the war is a genocide and called on the Venice festival to take “a clear and unambiguous position” against it.
Festival director Alberto Barbera told AFP on Wednesday that the festival “does not take direct political positions, it does not make political statements, as it is a cultural space for dialogue, discussion, and openness.”
He also ruled out censoring or boycotting artists.
The festival has selected a film about the war in Gaza in its main competition, which will vie for the prestigious Golden Lion prize.
“The Voice of Hind Rajab,” by Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania, reconstructs the death of six-year-old Palestinian girl Hind Rajab in early 2024.
Relatives found her body some 12 days after her death, along with the bodies of five of her family members and two ambulance workers who had gone to save her.
The Palestinian Red Crescent shared audio clips from a call to dispatchers that was initially made by Hind’s teenage cousin Layan Hamadeh, saying an Israeli tank was approaching, before shots rang out and she screamed. Believed to be the only survivor, Rajab stayed on the line for three hours with dispatchers, who tried to soothe her as they prepared to send an ambulance.
The Palestine Red Crescent Society has accused Israel of deliberately targeting the ambulance it sent to rescue Rajab.
The Israel Defense Forces said, some weeks after Rajab’s death, that an initial investigation suggested no troops were in the area when she was killed.
A Washington Post report published after the IDF’s statement found that Israeli armored vehicles were, in fact, operating in the area at the time, and that the gunfire heard in the Red Crescent recordings was consistent with IDF weapons.