After Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid was forced to pull out of French film festival FID Marseille, as part of a cultural boycott of Israel due to the Gaza war, several hundred filmmakers and actors, including Natalie Portman, Justine Triet and others, signed two different open letters in his support.

“Inviting an artist to a festival does not make them a cultural ambassador,” said the first letter, which was published on June 8 in French newspaper Le Monde.

The letter described the calls to boycott the festival, threats directed at its partners and funders and the withdrawal of films as “a campaign of intimidation.”

The signatories argued against reducing an artist to his nationality.

“In what way does the presence of a filmmaker on a jury or the screening of one of his films make him a representative of a state?” stated the letter.

“That Israel’s greatest dissident artist [who] tirelessly denounces the fascist and colonialist tendencies of his government and its criminal moral failings in films that have won awards worldwide, should be forced to withdraw from a French festival should alarm us and mobilize us beyond this absurdity,” the letter said.

“It should alert us to the obvious truth: whatever crimes their state may commit, no one can be reduced to a passport,” it added, saying citizens, especially artists, should never be held responsible for “crimes committed by governments they are often the most fervent critics of.”

“We stand with Nadav Lapid,” the letter concluded. “The cultural boycott is an intellectual dead end that we must collectively overcome.”

Lapid has lived in France since 2021, and has repeatedly and publicly........

© The Times of Israel