The recently concluded 13th edition of the Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF) ran into controversy when it cancelled the screenings of two films on the Palestinian genocide, No Other Land and From Ground Zero. The former chronicles Israeli demolitions on the West Bank, directed over five years between 2019 and 2023 by Palestinian activist Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham. Abraham is exasperated by the low traction his articles on the demolitions fetch. Adra isn’t bugged with this. It’s routine for him. The film foregrounds the Palestinian perspective throughout. While the film has had a celebrated international journey, it’s also dented from the start. At the Berlin Film Festival prize ceremony, a German minister of culture, Claudia Roth, was snapped clapping during the film’s win. Faced with ensuing backlash, Roth clarified later her applause was directed solely at the Israeli journalist, not the Palestinian standing beside him. Unsurprisingly the film hasn’t found a US distributor yet.
Palestine No-Show At DIFF 2024
The Dharamshala International Film Festival called off the screenings of films on Palestinian genocide.
The other film dropped from DIFF, From Ground Zero is an anthology of 22 shorts centering Israeli violence in Gaza, ranging between three and six minutes. The form and genres these shorts switch among are eclectic— veering from stop motion to documentary to narrative. The DIFF festival website carried a note for both the films, implying a pending confirmation before announcing their cancellations on an Instagram post. The same happened earlier at the MAMI Film Festival, where No Other Land and Russians at War were extricated from the schedule. The cursory reason provided was the inability to secure permissions. The MIB getting cold feet comes as no shock since India has had Israel as one of its staunchest security partners and noticeably abstained from UN votes in condemning the latter’s barbarity towards Palestine.
In an interview with Deccan Herald, Bina Paul—director of programming at DIFF—stated that the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting cited 2(iii) of the Policy for Certification of Films for Film Festivals ( ‘impinge on the security or integrity of the country or affect law and order or relations with other countries’). Exemptions weren’t granted to these titles. The festival had requested a clarification but the dates were imminent. There was also the setting of Dharamshala to reckon with, that attracts a surge of Israeli tourists every year.
The censorship obvious here is paradoxical. DIFF is also the only festival that housed a massive public screening of Dibakar Banerjee’s Tees, which has been put on hold by Netflix. The film spans a Kashmiri family across three generations. The festival has earned solid credo for consistently putting a smattering of politically unflinching films across the decade of its existence. What is permissible and debarred from public exhibition is a rugged terrain crisscrossing the nation-state’s socio-political imaginary, exposing all its fault lines. Various anxieties are laid bare.
While one may laud the festival for providing Banerjee a shelter for Tees and forging a preliminary public connect, witnessing it buckle to MIB, in line with a distinct pro-Israel stance, dampens it all. How does one grapple with the clashing degrees of appetite for brave, confrontational narratives under the auspices of the State?
