Israeli filmmaker and IFFI jury chief Nadav Lapid has said that he feels ashamed of the reaction from his country’s ambassador to India to his comments on the film, The Kashmir Files.
“I feel ashamed of this reaction of an Israeli diplomat. I ask myself what this person who is already an experienced ambassador exactly was doing in the Democracy and Freedom of Speech classes….I am an individual, not the property of this ambassador or the State of Israel, exactly as an Indian person is not the property of India. If I see something, I feel something, I am not supposed to say the opposite in order to serve the interests of a State. It’s totally a fascistic idea,” Lapid told journalist Karan Thapar in an interview for The Wire portal.
At the recently concluded IFFI (International Film Festival of India) in Goa, Lapid had expressed shock at The Kashmir Files, describing it as “a propaganda vulgar movie”.
Isreal’s ambassador Naor Gilon had then published an open letter to Lapid, saying that “as a human being, I feel ashamed and want to apologise to our hosts for the bad manner in which we repaid them for their generosity and friendship”. The ambassador had also hinted at a backlash over social media.
During the video interview from his home in Paris, Lapid told Thapar that he had also received thousands of threats. “The fact that someone, myself, gives his frank, harsh and critical opinion about the movie, and immediately I started to get thousands of extremely violent messages, being threatened.”
Lapid added: “All those people who write terrible things about me, if only for one second they would listen to what I said, immediately they would understand that they themselves are victims of a big manipulation…. The last thing I would have imagined is to disrespect this tragic event. Frankly, doesn’t a tragic event like this deserve a serious movie? Wouldn’t Indians like to have a piece of art that truly respects what happened with real artistic values instead of this vulgar product? I just can’t accept the idea that criticising a movie is criticising India, or (disrespecting) what happened in Kashmir.”
But he added that he also received several supportive messages from members of the Indian film industry, who conveyed to him that “finally someone is telling the truth”.
Lapid said: “It’s a very worrying symptom that so many people share this feeling that they want to tell something but they’re afraid and they wait for a foreign filmmaker to come and make this declaration.”
Clarification
Lapid clarified that in a separate interview to CNNNews18, he had apologized only to those who were killed and their relatives in Kashmir if they felt insulted by his comments but he was by no means expressing regrets for criticising the film.
“I didn’t want to insult anyone. My aim was never to insult the people or their relatives, who have suffered. I totally apologise if that’s the way they interpreted it,” Lapid told the channel on Wednesday night.
“But at the same time, whatever I said and I said clearly that for me and my fellow jury members, it was and it is a vulgar propaganda movie that didn’t have a place and was inappropriate for such a prestigious competitive section. I can repeat it again and again,” he added.
(Additional reporting by PTI)
