Miami Beach city commission meetings typically don’t generate national and international news, but that could happen Wednesday.
The commission is due to take up a resolution spearheaded by Mayor Steven Meiner that would cancel the city’s lease with a movie theater showing the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land. The mayor declared the film, which shows what life is like for Palestinians in the West Bank under Israeli military rule, to be antisemitic, and he moved to punish O Cinema after it refused his demand to yank the documentary.
Leading members of the documentary community will be watching the vote closely. More than 600 of them, including Oscar winners Alex Gibney, Laura Poitras, Barbara Kopple, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, Jimmy Chin and Dan Cogan, signed a letter that declares the resolution an attack on freedom of expression.
On the new episode of Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast, hosts John Ridley and Matt Carey discuss the uproar over the resolution and something that’s getting lost in the debate over No Other Land: that it’s directed by a collective of Palestinian and Israeli Jewish filmmakers, which puts the charge of antisemitism in a different light.
Doc Talk also reports from the 27th Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival in Greece, which just awarded its top prize to Coexistence, My Ass!, a documentary about Israeli comedian Noam Shuster-Eliassi, who advocates for peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians.
We speak with Yorgos Krassakopoulos, head of program at TiDF, about choosing the festival lineup and why he’s “not afraid” of potential protests like one that flared last year — serious enough for riot police to be called in to quell demonstrations.
We also speak with filmmaker Mark Andrew Altschul, who came to the Thessaloniki festival with All American. His documentary hits the mat with a diverse group of high school girl wrestlers, part of the vanguard turning the combat sport into a phenomenon about young women at the high school and college level.
That’s on the latest episode of Doc Talk, hosted by Oscar winner Ridley (12 Years a Slave, Shirley) and Carey, Deadline’s documentary editor. The pod is a production of Deadline and Ridley’s Nō Studios.
Listen to the episode above or on major podcast platforms including Spotify, iHeart and Apple.
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