Arts Activism

Massive media coverage ensued due to our work devising a red-carpet moment at the 2023 Israeli Film Awards, where Samar Qupty, nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her role in "The Future," brought bereaved mother Watfa Jabali, whose 26-year-old son was murdered before her eyes and one of the founders of the "Mothers for Life" movement, as her plus-one.

Samar wore a white dress with bullet holes in protest against gun violence in Palestinian communities in Israel and recruited major celebrities to wear black bracelets in solidarity. Although Samar did not win the award, her and Jabali's resolute stance together on the red carpet captured the hearts and minds of the press and the industry.

Jonathan Glazer, director of The Zone of Interest, focused the global attention during the Oscars, in the moment of his acceptance speech, on the situation in Gaza. The very next day, a letter began to circulate condemning the speech. That letter was signed by several hundred Jewish entertainment professionals. Together with our colleagues and friends, we recently contributed to a second letter supporting Glazer's message and an end to the war, signed now by several hundred Jewish entertainment professionals as well.

You'll see a bunch of Albi names, including Albi's very own founder Libby Lenkinski, alongside our flagship artists and Albi Fund-supported filmmakers including Rachel Leah Jones, Nadav Lapid, Barak Heymann, Michal Aviad, Ido Mizrahy, Yuval Orr, Yuval Avraham, Sandi DuBowski and many more. We're proud to show up in this way and form a critical mass and peace-pursuing movement of Jewish creatives, particularly Israelis, that are bringing a nuanced message about the war into this and other initiatives.

Albi is proud that our community plays a leading role in organizing Israeli filmmakers to reject the right-wing settler effort to cast cinema in the role of whitewasher of occupation.
In July 2022, when the inaugural settler Shomron (Samaria) Film Festival called for the Ophir Awards, Israel’s Oscars ceremony, to be hosted in the occupied West Bank, Filmmakers Against the Occupation was born. The settler festival and the connected Shomron Film Fund, supported directly by government ministers, along with major Israeli film institutions, funds, professional guilds, and distributors, are part and parcel of the mechanisms of apartheid, open to one ethnic group (Jews) and closed to another (Palestinians) living in the same geopolitical area (the occupied West Bank).
They exist to erase the green line and the distinction between military and civilian regimes [i.e. normalizing the settlements], and they invite Israeli filmmakers to take an active part in whitewashing the occupation in exchange for production financing and prizes.

In the words of the filmmaker-activists involved:
Filmmakers bear responsibility for the image of the societies in which they live. In an ongoing reality of occupation, and a creeping process of annexation, we must draw a red line.
We, the undersigned, hereby declare that we will not cooperate with the Shomron Fund — neither now nor in the future. ​We call upon the Israeli Academy of Film and Television, its leadership and members at large, to refuse to turn Israeli cinema into yet another instrument in the oppression of the Palestinian people.