It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was the age of wisdom. It was the age of foolishness. (Actually in this case, it was mostly foolishness.)
For two years now, the Toronto International Film Festival has had a program called City-to-City, highlighting movies from the present and past featuring a particular world city.
In 2009, the city was from a country that has invaded neighbors and occupied for some decades territory that is inhabited by an internationally-recognized people of another ethnic group and language who want a state of their own on that land. In battling against insurgents and terrorists, that nation sometimes violates human rights and has been credibly accused of war crimes.
In 2010, the city was from a country that has invaded neighbors and occupied for some decades territory that is inhabited by an internationally-recognized people of another ethnic group and language who want a state of their own on that land. In battling against insurgents and terrorists, that nation sometimes violates human rights and has been credibly accused of war crimes.
In 2009, that city was Tel Aviv. In 2010, that city is Istanbul. One of those City-to-City programs created a storm of controversy, public boycotts, open letters, a film being pulled. The other has created the proverbial perfect pin-dropping environment. And if you can’t figure out which is which, maybe I shouldn’t be quoting “A Tale of Two Cities,” but something more appropriate like “Rip Van Winkle.”
The City-to-City program for 2010 has nine feature films and a program of eight avant-garde shorts and gets under way Friday evening with a film called “40,” apparently about migration to Istanbul from within Turkey and from abroad.
And the crickets have been chirping.
To be sure there are differences between Turkey’s and Israel’s actions on the world stage, but they would be as likely to cut against the Turks as against the Israelis. Sure, Israel invaded Gaza more recently than Turkey did Cyprus, but Turkey set up a collaborationist regime that continues to occupy half the country to this day, and seems to plan to do so in perpetuity. And no serious person accuses Israel of outright genocide, while Turkey not only committed genocide against the Armenians but denies that to this day. But wait … all that ratiocination presupposes we are talking about objective or even rational moral judgments. We are not. We are talking about the international “concerned class,” artists heavily among them. For them crapping on Israel, that “shitty little country,” is an end in itself.
Last year, the City-to-City program prompted a group of about 50 celebrities, artists and “activists” to issue what they called “The Toronto Declaration” against the program. The signatories ranged from Hollywood stars like Jane Fonda and Danny Glover to such public intellectuals as Slavoj Zizek and Naomi Klein. Their public letter denounced Israel as an “apartheid regime,” called the program a whitewash, and accused the Festival of complicity in Israeli efforts to burnish its public image in Canada.
A week of unaccustomed furor resulted, producing coverage in every Canadian newspaper and TV network and such foreign outlets as Haaretz, the Associated Press and Reuters news agency. By the middle of the festival, another 1,500 usual suspects (do you need to know more than that Noam Chomsky was one?) had affixed their names to the protest and some of the signatories held a press conference and demonstration with about 250 people in attendance at Ryerson University, whose auditorium is a principal festival screening room. One of the initial signatories, Canadian filmmaker John Greyson, pulled his film “Covered” from the festival. Palestinian Elia Suleiman and Egyptian Yousry Nasrallah — who directed the two Arab films I saw here last year — were among the complainers, with both men in Toronto but avoiding official participation, including introducing their own films.
Both City-to-City programmer Cameron Bailey and overall festival director Piers Handling had to publicly defend the choice of city and of films, and the festival denied any involvement with the “Brand Israel” campaign (the signatories produced no evidence of any other than timing-based insinuation). Pro-Israel entertainers, including Jerry Seinfeld, Natalie Portman and Sacha Baron Cohen, pushed back at the height of the festival by purchasing an issue ad in Toronto newspapers, praising the program and TIFF’s decision as showcasing Israel’s vibrant democracy and open artistic culture.
This year? Protests from Greek or Cypriot or Armenian or Kurdish artists? Letters from their respective ethnic communities in Canada or the US? No. As best I can tell, there hasn’t been a single act of open protest — certainly none have been reported in mainstream or popular media. Not only that, but some of the loudest protesters last year will be here this year, apparently since TIFF’s focus on Istanbul won’t make it “part of the Turkish propaganda machine,” as their open letter last year put it about Israel.
Documentarian Sophie Fiennes has her latest film “Over Your Cities, Grass Will Grow,” being presented three times next week as part of the Visions program. Not only will leftist British director Ken Loach and writing partner Paul Laverty present their latest film, an Iraq War drama called “Route Irish,” as part of the prestigious Masters section, but the two men, who both signed last year’s petition, will participate in a 90-minute round-table discussion led by Michael Moore (I am not kidding) next Thursday as part of the Mavericks program.
Moore will probably be the most conservative of the three — Laverty once worked “in Nicaragua for a human-rights organization,” the Guidebook winkingly tells us before noting that their first collaboration “dealt with the US-backed war against the Sandinistas.” Wonder whether they’ll make a film about the US-backed war (Turkey gets American military aid) against the Greek Cypriots.
And it’s not as if the actual films in question seem to address the subject of Turkey’s foreign and security policies. In another “tale of two cities” standards, about half the Tel Aviv films, to judge from last year’s Festival’s guidebook, are in significant part about ties between Jew and Arab, between Israeli and Palestinian. As best I can tell from this year’s guidebook descriptions, Greeks, Cypriots, the Orthodox Church, Armenians and Kurds or Turkish behavior there-toward are not the surface subject matter of any (this is definitely the case for the one Istanbul film I’ve seen — Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “Distant”). Impressionistically, there’s no question which of these two programs is a whitewash of its country’s foreign-policy sins. None.
I tried to contact Mr. Bailey, who also co-programmed this year’s slate, to ask if he could definitively confirm both the seeming lack of protest and my Guidebook-based impressions of the films in each program. But he did not return multiple calls over two days, Tuesday and Wednesday. I figure he may have wanted not to talk. I can understand — who wants more controversy (and in case it isn’t obvious, my point isn’t that there should be a furor this year, but that there shouldn’t have been one last year).
But isn’t it surprising that the way to duck controversy is to pick a city from a country that invades Cyprus, oppresses (and maybe gasses) Kurds, is strangling the Orthodox Church and committed the 20th century’s first genocide? As long as Israel did none of these things? Surprising? Not in the Tale of Two Standards, it isn’t.
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