Israeli filmmaker and chief of the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) jury Nadav Lapid, who triggered a controversy in India earlier this week with his remarks against the film ‘The Kashmir Files,’ has got the support of all jury members except one Indian jurist. The supporters issued a joint statement.
Lapid had said during the closing ceremony of the IFFI in Goa that ‘The Kashmir Files’ was a ‘propaganda’ film and ‘vulgar.’ Israeli Ambassador to India Naor Gilon took exception to these remarks and asked the filmmaker to apologise. The India jury member Sudipto Sen disputed Lapid’s claims about the film directed by Vivek Agnihotri. Veteran actor Anupam Kher had acted in the film. Both of them have slammed Lapid.
According to the news portal The Wire, breaking their silence, the three foreign members of the IFFI jury have now said they stand behind what Lapid said. On Saturday, fellow jury member Jinko Gotoh tweeted a statement expressing the support of all the foreign members of the jury for Lapid’s stance on ‘The Kashmir Files.’
Though the handle has not been verified by Twitter, Lapid confirmed to The Wire that the statement put out by the Twitter account was authentic and that the jury members had emailed him a copy, the website stated.
The statement reads: “At the festival’s closing ceremony, Nadav Lapid, the jury’s president, made a statement on behalf of the jury members, stating : “We were all of us disturbed and shocked by the 15th film, The Kashmir Files, that felt to us like a vulgar propaganda movie, inappropriate for an artistic competitive section of such a prestigious film festival.”
“We stand by his statement.
“And to clarify, we were not taking a political stance on the film’s content. We were making an artistic statement, and it saddens us greatly to see the festival platform being used for politics and subsequent personal attacks on Nadav. That was never the intention of the jury.” The statement is signed by filmmakers Gotoh, Pascale Chavance and Javier Angulo Barturen.
The Wire said its email to the three was to yet to elicit a response, however, Sebastien Farcis, Delhi correspondent of the French newspaper Liberation managed to speak to two of them for a story he filed.
The French film editor Pascale Chavance, he wrote, gave her full support to Nadav Lapid. “It is so obvious that it is a propaganda film,” Farcis quoted her saying, the website pointed out. Spanish director Javier Angulo Barturen concurred: “I completely agree with what Nadav Lapid said in his speech, because it was the majority opinion within the jury.”
