Natalie Portman and French directors Justine Triet (Anatomy of a Fall) and Jacques Audiard (Emilia Perez) have joined an open letter condemning the cultural boycott of Israeli director Nadav Lapid.

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Lapid was set to attend the Marseille International Film Festival in July as part of the jury, but pulled out following pressure from pro-Palestinian filmmakers, who threatened to withdraw their films from selection if Lapid took part.

The Israeli director is a sharp critic of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and has lived in France since 2021. His last feature, Yes, is a scathing satire on the radicalization of contemporary Israeli society and the complicity of the country’s artistic community in the killings in Gaza and the West Bank. But because the film was partially financed by the Israeli Film Fund, some pro-Palestinian activists have accused Lapid of complicity with the Israeli government and called for a boycott of him and his work.

On Monday, more than 350 leading figures in the French film industry, including producers Saïd Ben Saïd (Elle) and Judith Lou Lévy (Dahomey), along with directors Stéphane Demoustier (The Great Arch) and Mati Diop (Atlantics, Dahomey), signed an open letter, published in French newspaper Le Monde calling the cultural boycott of Lapid “an intellectual failure.”

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“That Israel’s greatest dissident artist [who] tirelessly denounces the fascist and colonialist tendencies of his government and its criminal moral failings in films that have won awards worldwide, should be forced to withdraw from a French festival should alarm us and mobilize us beyond this absurdity,” the letter reads. “It should alert us to the obvious truth: whatever crimes their state may commit, no one can be reduced to a passport.”

The letter’s signatores argue that Lapid, like dissident Russian or Iranian filmmakers, should not be held accountable for “crimes committed by governments they are often the most fervent critics of.” Continuing to invite these artists to festivals, they say, puts more political pressure on authoritarian regiemes than boycotting them. They point to Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev, who won the Grand Prix in Cannes last month for Minotaur and used the ceremony to call on Vladimir Putin to “end the carnage” in Ukraine.

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