Srinagar- Noted London-based Kashmiri author Mirza Waheed has boycotted the screening of the film adaptation of his novel, ‘The Collaborator’ at Tamuz Shomron Film Festival held in an Israeli settlement.
Waheed’s decision stems from his strong opposition to the festival’s association with Israeli cultural institutions complicit in the oppression of Palestinians.
Waheed, who recently signed a global pledge alongside over 5,000 writers and publishers to avoid working with Israeli cultural institutions linked to human rights abuses, said he would not participate in any promotional or public relations activities for the film unless it is withdrawn from the festival.
“Tamuz Shomron Film Festival is held in the settlement of Ariel in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and is organized with support from the Shomron (“Samaria/West Bank”) Cinema Fund, dubbed the “settler film fund” by its critics in Israel. A large number of prominent Israeli filmmakers and actors boycotted the Samaria Cinema Fund and its inaugural film festival two years ago,” Waheed informed through a write-up in website Literary Hub.
“I cannot allow my work to be associated with a platform whose purpose is to whitewash Israeli apartheid and undermine Palestinian rights,” Waheed said.
Waheed said that he is disturbed that his name may be associated, even tangentially, with any Israeli cultural organization, institution, or event linked to or complicit in the dispossession and disempowerment of Palestinians.
“There’s something fundamentally wrong about screening a film in an Israeli settlement in the middle of a genocide,” he said, citing his firsthand experience of the apartheid system during a visit to Palestine.
Notably, Mulberry Films, a production house from the US, has joined hands with Metro Productions from Georgia to bring the acclaimed author’s narrative set against Kashmir’s tumultuous political backdrop in the 1990s, to life on the silver screen. “As war rages in India’s volatile border region of Kashmir, a young boy is recruited by an Indian army officer to perform a grim task, to go into the valley where Kashmiri rebels have been killed and retrieve their weapons and ID cards,” reads the description of the film on IMDB.com.
“It is not in my power to determine what the producers choose to do with their film, but it is wholly in my power to choose what I do in this matter,” Waheed said.
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