Nobody Passes the Test

On this week’s Cinema in One Take, Emma and I got into the Nadav Lapid affair at FIDMarseille, and I found myself doing what journalists are meant to do, though perhaps not often enough: I made the other side’s argument properly. Emma said she felt that the treatment of Lapid was baffling. I played devil’s advocate, and said I was doing so. I also said this needed a written piece, because a podcast is a bad place to leave a position that complicated.

That, at its best, is what Cinema in One Take is for: letting cinema complicate the positions people arrive with.

Audio is slippery. Clips travel without the context that framed them. And given my own history — critic, programmer, former director of international programming at the Red Sea International Film Festival — I do not want any ambiguity about where I stand.

What happened to Nadav Lapid in Marseille was wrong.

A filmmaker withdrew from being on the jury of a film festival not for anything he had made, said or done, but because a small portion of his latest film’s budget came through an Israeli public fund. For those unfamiliar with Lapid’s work, his cinema has been among the fiercest, most lucid attacks on the Israeli state produced by any Israeli artist. To silence him in the name of Palestine is not a victory over Israeli power. It is a gift to Israeli power.

The Israeli culture ministry would quite like Nadav Lapid to shut up.

In Marseille, that wish was granted.

Now that I have said that clearly, I can say the rest. Because the rest is where the story becomes uncomfortable. Almost everything about this affair is grey, and the people pretending otherwise — on either side — are the real problem.

Lapid, a Golden Bear winner who has lived in Paris since 2021, by his own account for political reasons, was invited onto the jury of FIDMarseille. The festival runs July 7–12. Campaigners demanded that he be removed as part of the cultural boycott of Israel over Gaza. Around a dozen filmmakers withdrew their films in mid-May. Lapid left the jury in late May. Offered instead a screening of his 2011 film Policeman and a masterclass, he withdrew altogether.

Then came the letters. One in Le Monde, signed by more than 350 filmmakers, including Justine Triet, Claire Denis and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, described the pressure as “a campaign of intimidation.” Another, with Natalie Portman and Jacques Audiard among its ten names, argued that “no one should be reduced to a passport.” The pro-boycott collective La Palestine Sauvera le Cinéma replied with a statement of its own: “Yes, Cinema Is Political.”

It is. That is precisely why this cannot be reduced to slogans.

It is easy to be cynical about those letters. Three hundred and fifty signatures gathered in days; in French cinema, defending Nadav Lapid — the most garlanded dissident in European film — is the consensus position, and a signature costs nothing. But the cynicism would be unfair: the letters do not merely defend a famous director, they call his government’s conduct criminal and argue that relentless invitation is a sharper political lever than erasure. The hardest position in this affair belongs, remarkably, to Lapid himself. He has refused to call the boycotting filmmakers enemies, describing their actions as “powerlessness, anger and immense frustration at the political inaction around Gaza.” He has supported genuine political sanctions against Israel for years. Sit with that: the boycotted man believes in pressure on his own state more concretely than many of those boycotting him — he only rejects the version that lands on artists instead of governments.

The case for the boycott is stronger than many of its critics allow. Refusing to engage with it is not moral clarity. It is laziness.

At its core is an argument about false equivalence. To programme Palestinian and Israeli films side by side, as if they were symmetrical cultural products from two equal sides of a dispute, can erase power, history and material reality.

Berlin learned this the hard way. The Berlinale’s long-standing defence — we programme the films, we show every perspective, we let the audience decide — fell on its sword in 2024, when No Other Land, made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective, won the documentary prize and its directors used the stage to denounce the occupation. German politicians declared the ceremony antisemitic. Pro-Palestinian filmmakers accused the festival of censorship. The festival kept insisting it was a neutral platform, and nobody on either side accepted the claim, because the claim was never quite true. Festivals are very good at pretending that balance is neutral. It rarely is. A programme is an argument, even when the catalogue note says otherwise.

There is also the South Africa precedent. The cultural boycott of apartheid South Africa was broad. It caught dissident artists too. History has not generally treated that as a disgrace. The argument then, as now, was that exceptions for the “good” artists allow the system to continue with a cleaner conscience.

And, on paper, the boycott criteria are institutional rather than ethnic. The objection to Lapid was not supposed to be that he is Israeli. It was that Yes received money from the Israel Film Fund. Narimane Mari, one of the filmmakers who withdrew, put that case at its cleanest: “We are not condemning a human being — we are refusing a cultural and political model that continues to be maintained.”

It also leads to the Russian comparison, which European cinema has never quite managed to answer. After the invasion of Ukraine, festivals moved quickly against films with Russian state funding. That position was widely accepted as principled. At the same time, dissident Russian filmmakers without state money remained welcome. Cannes gave its Grand Prix to Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur, and rightly so.

Dissident artist: yes. State money: no.

So the obvious question is: if Russian state funding is disqualifying, why not Israeli state funding?

That is a serious question. The answer is not to pretend the parallel does not exist. The answer is to examine if the parallel holds true.

And it breaks at the institution.

The Israel Film Fund is a public body, but not simply a government office. In the case of Yes, its contribution was 12 per cent of the budget. The fund has financed Palestinian as well as Israeli filmmakers, and its history runs through some of the most government-unfriendly cinema Israel has produced: Waltz With Bashir, Lebanon, Lapid’s own work.

Boycott advocates dispute the independence of such bodies. They argue that state-linked money is state-linked money. That is a coherent position. But it is not a simple one. The exact relationship between fund, ministry, state and artist is the kind of institutional plumbing on which everyone suddenly has a very loud opinion and very few verifiable facts.

That ought to make people a little less certain than they sound.

The contradiction is there in Lapid’s Ahed’s Knee. The film is a furious attack on the Israeli culture ministry, and it carries that ministry, and the Israel Film Fund, in its credits. Its central scene comes from Lapid’s own experience: invited by the ministry in 2018 to present The Kindergarten Teacher in Sapir, he was required to sign a form restricting what he could discuss in the Q&A.

That is state pressure. No ambiguity there.

And yet public money helped finance the film that denounced it.

This is not an isolated absurdity. From 2017, the Rabinovich Foundation required filmmakers to pledge that their work would not “harm the good name of the State of Israel.” More than a hundred filmmakers, including Lapid and Ari Folman, boycotted the fund until the clause was dropped in 2022. Around the same period, 250 Israeli filmmakers protested the creation of the Shomron Fund, designed to encourage films shot in the West Bank — production money as political whitewash. Last year, the culture minister moved to defund the Ophir Awards after The Sea won Best Film.

So both things are true.

Israeli film funds have been independent enough to finance cinema that attacks the state. The Israeli government has also repeatedly tried to discipline, redirect and intimidate those same cultural structures.

Anyone who tells you the Israel Film Fund is simply free has not been paying attention. Anyone who tells you it is simply an arm of the state has not been paying attention either.

The part of the story that has received far too little attention is this: the filmmakers most damaged by institutional boycott criteria are often Arab.

Scandar Copti, who famously refused to "represent" Israel when Ajami became its Oscar entry in 2010, had no say in that submission — the film won the Ophir, Israel's top film award, which made it Israel's entry automatically. Ajami was a joint Palestinian-Israeli production; Copti's subsequent film Happy Holidays was structured entirely through Palestinian and European funding, precisely to avoid that bind. But the bind itself is real: a Palestinian filmmaker's work, made in Haifa about Palestinian life, entered the boycott's crosshairs not through any political choice he made but through the mechanics of how Israeli awards work.

Under boycott criteria, that makes Copti’s Palestinian story boycottable.

Baher Agbariya, the Haifa-based Palestinian producer of The Sea, has called the boycott “collective punishment.” His film, about a West Bank boy, so angered Israel’s culture minister that he moved to defund the Ophirs. So here is the absurdity in its purest form: a film the Israeli government wanted punished, and the boycott criteria would keep off-screen.

Then there are the less famous cases: filmmakers in the West Bank, filmmakers who have lived in Gaza, Palestinian citizens of Israel, all navigating funding structures that are compromised, limited, often infuriating, but sometimes the only route to getting a film made.

This is not theoretical. Palestinian filmmakers get trapped by criteria designed, in theory, to protect Palestinians. And unlike Lapid, they cannot simply relocate their professional infrastructure to Paris.

Lapid has options. Many of them do not.

This does not mean Palestinian filmmakers are united against the boycott. They are not. Annemarie Jacir signed the boycott pledge. Agbariya opposes it. Neither position is unjustifiable. “The boycott hurts Arab filmmakers” and “Arab filmmakers support the boycott” are both true. Anyone who gives you only one of those sentences is selling you a position, not describing the field.

The tempting answer is to exempt the dissidents. Let in the “good Israelis.”

That sounds reasonable until you try to administer it.

Who decides how much dissent is enough? Is a petition enough? A film? A speech? A refusal of public money? For Israeli residents, does political purity now mean not working at all? The moment festivals start deciding which Israelis are acceptable, they become tribunals of conscience. They do not have the legitimacy for that. Nor, frankly, do they have the competence.

You also create a grotesque performance economy: say the right thing, at the right time, in the right venue, and you may be permitted entry. Say the wrong thing two years later and what then? Is the invitation revoked? Are previous statements reviewed? Does every retrospective require an ideological audit?

This is why the boycott chose institutional criteria in the first place. Judge funding, not souls. It is cleaner. It is checkable. It avoids the good-Israeli/bad-Israeli circus. Except it does not: the institutional test simply moves the unfairness one step away. It still catches Copti, Agbariya and Lapid. And in Marseille, the distinction between institution and individual collapsed anyway. Whatever the formal language, the demand in practice was that this man should not be there.

So let us tally the available tests.

The passport test defines everyone as one national whole.

The ideology test is inquisitorial.

The funding test punishes people trapped inside the very structures it wants to oppose.

Nobody passes.

That is the tragedy. This is not a debate with a clean winner. It is a structure that keeps failing human beings.

War makes people stupid. Not intellectually stupid, necessarily, but morally over-efficient. It compresses categories. It turns contradiction into betrayal.

Lapid is Israeli and anti-government. Copti is Palestinian and funded through Israeli institutions. These are not exceptions. This is what the cinema actually looks like.

But binary systems cannot process mixed cases. Boycottable or not. Complicit or not. Us or them.

Lapid is both Israeli and dissident.

The machine cannot process him, so it expels him.

Anyone who knows Lapid’s cinema will recognise the territory, because it is exactly where his films live. Yoav in Synonyms refuses to speak Hebrew on the streets of Paris, trying to scrub the Israeli out of himself, and cannot. The director in Ahed’s Knee rages against the state whose money sits in his credits. The musician in Yes agrees to soundtrack the regime he despises. Lapid’s protagonists are people who will not resolve into one thing — Israeli and anti-Israeli, fleeing the country and carrying it everywhere. That unresolvable doubleness is not a weakness of the films. It is their engine, and the reason juries keep giving them prizes. The boycott has achieved what no critic ever managed: it has trapped Lapid inside one of his own films. A body of work that says, over and over, I cannot be reduced — answered by a campaign that reduced him.

This is why festivals matter. At their best, they are not consensus machines. They are places where contradictions sit in the same room. On the podcast, Emma and I began some distance apart and ended closer, not because either of us surrendered, but because the complications were allowed to breathe.

That is what a festival is supposed to do at scale.

Which is why excluding artists from it is so self-defeating.

My sharpest criticism is not for the boycotters. It is for the institutions.

Lapid put it well: “The problem first and foremost is cinema institutions that aren’t courageous enough.”

If FIDMarseille believed in its invitation, it should have stood by it. Let the withdrawing filmmakers withdraw. Let them say why. Put the conflict in public, where it belongs. Instead, the burden was shifted onto Lapid: here are the names pulling out, here is a reduced offer of a screening and a masterclass, now you decide.

That is institutional cowardice dressed up as sensitivity.

The festival’s director signed the Le Monde letter and has spoken clearly about the wider danger — but that came after the fact. The relevant test came earlier, and it was failed.

The more damaging version, though, is the one no one sees: festivals and distributors anticipating trouble and quietly not selecting the film, not inviting the filmmaker, not taking the meeting. No open letter. No controversy. No fingerprints.

I have sat in those rooms. I have heard a prominent festival director tell me it is too much trouble to programme films from Israel today. Not a judgment on a film. Not a position anyone will defend in a press release. Just trouble, weighed against convenience, with the artist paying the difference. I have heard programmers calculate that a single Israeli film in the line-up could cost them a dozen Arab filmmakers. That is the Marseille arithmetic, done quietly, in advance, with no one watching. It is happening constantly. And it is worse than Marseille because at least Marseille happened in public. At least we can argue about it.

There is no clean solution, but there is a professional obligation.

I studied law before I gave my life to cinema, and the first thing law school teaches you is that every rule produces anomalies: cases the drafters never imagined, where applying the letter of the rule defeats its purpose. The law’s answer was not only to write better rules. It was judgment: equity, the principle that the intent of a law matters as much as its text. Festivals are now learning the same lesson the hard way. No boycott criteria will ever be drafted finely enough to separate Lapid from a state mouthpiece, or Copti from his funding. The only instrument that can is the one every rulebook secretly depends on: a person, weighing a case, and answering for the decision.

Programmers must programme. They must make decisions case by case, defend them openly, and refuse to outsource their judgment to whoever applies the most pressure. Not every Israeli film deserves a platform. Not every Israeli institution is innocent. Not every boycott demand is illegitimate. But the decision belongs to the festival, and if the festival cannot defend it, it should not have made it.

What it must not do is transfer the cost of its fear onto the artist.

I said on air that I like Nadav Lapid, and some of my sympathy is personal. Fine. I will own that. But the argument does not depend on liking him.

It depends on Lapid in Paris, Copti in Haifa, Agbariya with a film neither side wants to claim — none of them abstractions, all of them cinema.

They are the people both sides say they are fighting for.

And if our politics cannot make room for them, then it is not the artists who have failed the test.

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