Israeli director Nadav Lapid, angered by boycott calls, pulls out of Marseille festival
The Israeli filmmaker, a critic of Benjamin Netanyahu exiled in France for five years, wonders 'what the hell I'm supposed to do' here if 'my presence is unacceptable and I can simply be erased or swept aside from a film event'.
No one is a prophet in their own land, as the saying goes, but sometimes host countries are hardly any more receptive...
Calls not to work with Israeli institutions “involved in genocide and apartheid against the Palestinian people”, which have been gathering thousands of signatures in Hollywood, have apparently crossed the Mediterranean.
Thus the participation of Israeli director Nadav Lapid in the 37th edition of the Marseille International Film Festival (FID, from 7 to 12 July) was given a decidedly cool reception by some of the selected filmmakers, who initially refused to see him sit on the jury and then to endorse his presence at the festival at all.
The director, winner of the Golden Bear in Berlin in 2019, as well as jury prizes in Locarno (2011) and Cannes (2021), had been due to present his film Policeman (2011) at FID.
What has sparked this outcry, at least according to what has been said publicly, are the Israeli public funds used to finance – in very small part – Lapid's latest film, Yes, screened at Cannes in 2025 in the Directors' Fortnight.
Ironically, or perhaps through activist blindness that sees only the colour of a passport – or of money – Yes, searing like all of the filmmaker's work, portrays an Israeli society disfigured by a thirst for vengeance after 7 October and indifferent to Palestinian deaths in Gaza.
Nadav Lapid is also known as a fierce critic of Benjamin Netanyahu; he moved to France five years ago precisely in protest at the Israeli government's policies.
As for the Israeli money used to produce Lapid's latest incendiary film, “the Israeli subsidy the film received comes from a public fund and not a government one, and it is precisely the kind of independent body that is under attack from the Netanyahu government,” Judith Lou Lévy, producer of Yes at Les Films du Bal, told AFP, adding that this public funding accounted for only 12% of the film's budget.
After the internal call for a boycott, followed by the withdrawal of around ten of the 120 films scheduled at this festival, which showcases independent fiction and documentary cinema, Nadav Lapid himself pulled out of the event in Marseille.
Regrets all round?
In a statement, FID deplored the boycott, calling it “perfectly illegitimate to hold a filmmaker responsible or accountable for the racist, colonial and genocidal policy pursued by the government of his country”.
“Distinctive voices which, like that of Nadav Lapid, strive to think through the specific violence of the state and society of Israel should on the contrary be welcomed and listened to, even if their narratives are then challenged or deconstructed,” the statement said.
For his part, Lapid lamented to AFP the festival's “resignation” and the call for a boycott, which threw him back onto his “vulnerability” as an exile in France. “When I saw the pressure regarding my participation in the festival, I told myself that perhaps I had no place in France. If my presence is unacceptable and I can simply be erased or swept out of a film event, I really don't know what the hell I'm doing here, to be honest,” he said.
While refusing to “feel sorry for himself”, Nadav Lapid says he is “relieved” that film-industry professionals took the initiative of launching an open letter to support him, a text which FID says it “fully” endorses.
Entitled “Inviting an artist to a festival does not make them a cultural ambassador”, the letter, published on Monday in Le Monde (source in French), voices concern that an artist who “has publicly condemned, on numerous occasions, the destruction of Gaza” could be equated with “any kind of Israeli cultural representation”.
Among the roughly 350 signatories are directors Arthur Harari, Louis Garrel, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Claire Denis, as well as the Société des réalisatrices et réalisateurs de films (SRF) and Palestinian writer Elias Sanbar.
In addition, another group of filmmakers, including Oscar-winning director Michel Hazanavicius and Palme d'Or winners Justine Triet and Jacques Audiard, on Tuesday described as an “intellectual failure” the call for a boycott that forced the Israeli director to cancel his trip to Marseille.
“The fact that the greatest Israeli dissident artist, tirelessly working to denounce the fascistic and colonial excesses of his government and its criminal moral failures, in films that have won awards all over the world, should be led to withdraw from a French festival ought to alert us and mobilise us beyond this aberration,” writes this collective, also in Le Monde (source in French), a group that also includes American actor Natalie Portman.
For their part, the 12 filmmakers who had called for a boycott of Nadav Lapid justified their stance in a message on Instagram by their desire “to act against an approved colonial and genocidal reality” and denounced festivals' “insistence” on “producing a symmetry (...) between Palestinian and Israeli productions”.
