kayhan.ir

News ID: 86729
Publish Date : 20 January 2021 - 21:38

Filmmakers Denounce Zionist Ban on Palestinian Documentary ‘Jenin, Jenin’

WEST BANK (Dispatches) – Filmmakers and cinema producers on Wednesday denounced an Israeli court decision to ban the screening of the 2002 Palestinian documentary Jenin, Jenin, three years after a libel and defamation case was filed by a Zionist army officer against the Palestinian director Mohammad Bakri.
Bakri, a renowned actor and filmmaker, was asked by Lod District Court on Monday to pay $55,000 in damages to Nissim Magnagi, a Zionist officer who appears in the film, for defamation, and $15,000 for legal expenses.
All 23 copies of the film will be seized, and it will be banned from screening in all cinemas in the occupied territories.
The film is a set of interviews with Palestinians who lived during the Zionist regime’s military invasion of the Jenin refugee camp, north of the occupied West Bank, at the height of the Second Intifada in April 2002.
The 11-day assault by the Zionist regime killed 52 Palestinians, including women, elderly and children, and almost 300 homes were razed to the ground by the regime’s bulldozers. The Zionist regime’s army, which launched a major military operation in West Bank cities in 2002, said that 23 soldiers were killed.
Among the filmmakers demanding the lifting of the screening ban on Jenin, Jenin are British film directors Ken Loach and Asif Kapadia, Finnish screenwriter and director Aki Kaurismaki, Palestinian filmmakers Michel Khleifi and Annemarie Jacir, and Israeli director Eyal Sivan.
"As members of the world’s cinema community, we denounce the Israeli court’s decision to ban the screening and distribution of the documentary film "Jenin, Jenin”, and express our solidarity with its maker, our colleague, the prominent Palestinian director and actor Mohammed Bakri,” they wrote in a petition.
They added that they had received the news of banning the screening of the documentary with "consternation and outrage”.