Riffs & Ripples from ZenRiver Gardens

Buoyant blog of septuagenarian (78) Kanadian poet and haikuist Chris Faiers/cricket. People's Poetry in the tradition of Milton Acorn, haiku/haibun, progressive politikal rants, engaged Buddhism and meditation, revitalizing of Callaghan's Rapids Conservation Area, memories of ZenRiver Gardens and Purdy Country LitFests (PurdyFests), events literary and politikal, and pics, amid swirling currents of earth magick and shamanism. Read in 119 countries last week - 43,329 readers in September.

Showing posts with label No Other Land. Show all posts

Tuesday, 17 March 2026

Oscar Confidential: Judy Haiven

Oscar Confidential

MAR 17

READ IN APP

There was a time at the Oscars when an actor who had just won would thank his film’s producer, director and then his mother. He might have joked, “hugs to mom – she’s watching tonight.” That homey apolitical stance shifted in 1973 when screen star Marlon Brando, in a stunning move, dispatched Indigenous rights activist Sacheen Littlefeather to the Oscar stage on his behalf to refuse his award for Best Actor in The Godfather. Littlefeather cited the reason for his rejection of the Oscar was “bad treatment of Indigenous people in America”.

In 2015, the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite – was initiated by activist April Reign – protested that not one of 20 nominees that year was a person of colour.

*A “Free Palestine” sticker is stuck on a traffic light on September 29, 2025 in Berlin, Germany (photo Maja Hitij/Getty Images)*

In 2016, when Black comedian Chris Rock emceed the Oscars, he opened by asking aloud, “Is Hollywood racist? You’re damn right Hollywood’s racist.” That same year only Dustin Hoffman refused to attend because of racism in America.

Don’t stop talking about Gaza

This year, the media noted only one outlier — Spanish actor Javier Bardem. He wore a “No to War” (No a la Guerra) button –and yelled “No to war and Free Palestine,” just before he announced the winner for Best International Feature.

*Javier Bardem arrives at the Oscars wearing ‘No to war’ and Handala pins on March 15, 2026, at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)*

Also worth noting at this year’s Oscars, three films about Palestinians and Palestine were nominated yet not one won an award. The three are Palestine 36, All That’s Left of You, and The Voice of Hind Rajab.

It’s as though Hollywood said “been there, done that” before the ’26 awards night. Indeed in 2025 the critically-acclaimed Israeli-Palestinian film about Gaza –No Other Land—won Best Documentary Feature. Now after Israel has killed more than 73,000 in its war on Palestinians, and committed the war crime of genocide in Gaza, it is suffering a fade-out.

In 2026, the most talked about film that did not win was The Voice of Hind Rajab. The Voice of Hind Rajab is a drama created from a true story from Gaza City in January 2024. Six year-old Hind, a Palestinian girl, was in a car with her aunt, uncle and four cousins trying to escape Israel’s bombings. Stuck in a street with towers of concrete rubble everywhere, one of three Israeli tanks advanced on the car. The tank fired more than 335 bullets into the car killing the two adults and four children. Hind called emergency on a mobile phone as her last cousin, Layan age 15, lay dying next to her. The Palestinian Red Crescent managed to patch Hind into her mother’s phone. Hind begged for someone to rescue her; her last tearful words to her mother were “Don’t leave me alone, Mama. I am tired. I am thirsty. And I am wounded.”

*Palestinian girl Hind Rajab poses for a photograph in this undated handout picture obtained by Reuters on February 10, 2024 [Palestine Red Crescent Society/Reuters]*

Though the Red Crescent sent an ambulance, the Israelis deliberately denied it “safe passage” which delayed help for hours. By then it was too late. What’s worse: when the ambulance finally arrived on the scene, the IDF shelled it murdering the two paramedics.

The world was shocked by little Hind’s death among all those others. The film garnered the production support of folks like Brad Pitt, Joaquin Phoenix, Rooney Mara, Alfonso Cuarón, Jonathan Glazer (he who won best international film for Zone of Interest and used his speech to condemn Israel), Spike Lee, and Michael Moore.

Last Sunday before the Academy Awards, I thought about The Voice of Hind Rajab (stream on Amazon Prime, or Apple TV). I thought about the similarities between Israel’s murders of Hind and her family in the car and news about Israel’s latest targeted killings.

On Sunday news broke that the Israeli forces deliberately shot and killed four members of the Bani Odeh family, the father, mother and two boys, age 5 and 7 in their car in the West Bank village of Tammun. All were killed by Israelis shooting bullets thru the windshield into the heads and faces of the family. The father, Ali Khaled, was shot in the left hand and chest too. Two other sons were injured, but alive. One, aged 11, was dragged injured out of the car, beaten and heard the soldiers say, “We killed dogs.” The family was driving home from Nablus 23 km away – after a shopping trip for clothes and toys to celebrate Eid al-Fitr that marks the end of Ramadan this Thursday. They turned into their street. Witnesses said the gunmen were not in uniformand drove vehicles with Palestinian plates. Not only was it a totally unprovoked attack on the Palestinian family, but the Red Crescent said the Israelis had prevented ambulance crews from reaching the injured instead ordered them to leave.

Mourners pray in front of the bodies of the Palestinian family, parents and their two children, who were killed by Israeli forces in Tammun town near Tubas, occupied West Bank [Mohammed Torokman/Reuters]

A family returns from shopping– Israel deems them “an immediate threat”

No one is holding their breath waiting for an investigation about these two “events” – or mass murders. Israel was happy to ignore the Rajab killings until an international calibre filmmaker Tunisian Kaouther Ben Hania came on the scene, and, together with some big Hollywood names, produced a stunning film. On Sunday, Israel’s military and police said their forces opened fire on the Bani Odehs after believing the family in the car was “an immediate threat.” [Isn’t that always the excuse?] Apparently the incident is “under investigation.”

How does Israel spin this stuff? Now that world attention is diverted to Iran and the Gulf states Israel keeps up their genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. The arms, weapons, ammunition, tanks, drones, quadcopters and more overwhelmingly come from the US. Canada ships more than $1 billion in ammunition and weapons each year to the US and much of it is sent on to Israel—so it can keep up a genocide over 2.5 years. We laughingly list the names of the US’s most steadfast allies at the UN the Marshall Islands, Vanuatu and Mali …. But then we must stop. Surely one of the greatest US allies is still Canada — PM Carney’s new plan to boost production and sales of weapons will ensure an endless supply to the US –and then to Israel. Note that Canadian parliamentarians just overwhelmingly voted down a private members’ bill by NDPer Jenny Kwan to close the loophole that allows this to happen. Still, 15 brave Liberal MPs had the guts to vote against their to close the loophole.

Image at the top: A mosque, destroyed during Israel’s two-year genocidal war on Gaza, is surrounded by tents for displaced Palestinians, in Gaza City, February 15, 2026 [credit: Mahmoud Issa/Reuters]

Tuesday, 11 March 2025

'verboten' 2025 Oscar winning doc

Thanks for reading Judy Haiven’s Newsletter! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

The film that won the Academy Award for Best Documentary last week still has no Canadian—or North American– distributor.

No Other Land got rave reviews. It is about the ongoing destruction of Palestinians’ villages in the Masafer Yatta area of the South Hebron Hills— in the Occupied West Bank. The film shows Israel’s soldiers and Jewish settlers destroying Palestinians’ homes, their livestock, tearing down the school and poisoning their water wells. In an unlikely friendship between two young men, Yuval, an Israeli Jew and Basel – a Palestinian lawyer – the men decide to document Israel’s violent land grab of Palestinian land. No Other Land has attracted international media interviews with the Israeli and Palestinian co-filmmakers.

Not everyone agrees that No Other Land is a great film. Israel’s diehard supporters refuse to acknowledge Israel’s genocide– the deliberate murders of more than 48,405 mainly women, children and the elderly in Gaza over the last 18 months. More than 111,835 Palestinians have been seriously injured. More than 35,055 children have lost one or both parents. Israeli politicians were infuriated by No Other Land. Israel’s Minister of Culture Miki Zohar – a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party – called the win “a sad moment for the world of cinema… slandering Israel on the global stage.”

*Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham holding the Best Documentary Award for their film ‘No Other Land’ at the Berlinale film festival, February 24, 2024 (Ali Ghandtschi/Berlinale 2024)*

In his acceptance speech, No Other Land’s Palestinian co-director Basel Adra condemned Israel’s “ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people”; his Israeli co-director Yuval Abraham demanded an end to Israel’s “unequal” treatment of Palestinians. Here’s a trailer for the film.

Despite winning an Oscar, No Other Land still has no US or Canadian distributor. We all can guess why that is. Do you suppose the film being labelled “antisemitic” is part of the reason no one wants to take it on? Does the film offend Jews – or does it offend those who support Israel’s power to drive Palestinians off their land, or kill them directly. Let’s look at a brief history of “controversial” films that are about Palestinians.

In 2013, 5 Broken Cameras was nominated for Best Documentary Features at the 85^th Academy Awards. Its co-directors –Palestinian olive farmer and videographer Emad Burnat and Israeli Guy Davidi faced months of limited distribution prior to Kino Lorber taking over their film’s North American distribution. To add insult to injury, police at Los Angeles airport grabbed and detained Palestinian filmmaker Burnat, his wife Soraya and 8-year old son Gibreel– the “star” of Five Broken Cameras — when the family landed to attend the Oscars.

Burnat texted filmmaker Michael Moore to call for help. As Burnat wrote, “Can you help- they will send us back”. Moore got a lawyer to spring the family from detention. Burnat told Moore over the phone,

“ [Immigration and Customs] would not believe him when he told them he was an Oscar-nominated director on his way to this Sunday’s Oscars and to the events in LA leading up to the ceremony. He is also a Palestinian. And an olive farmer. Apparently that was too much for Homeland Security to wrap its head around.”

The police gave Burnat a window of less than 24 hours to remain in the US,to attend the Oscars and then leave the country. Remember, this was not under Trump 1 or Trump 2, but under the Obama presidency.

In 2012, there was The Gatekeepers, an Israeli-made film, about the lives and opinions of the six Jewish directors of Israel’s Shin Bet – Israel’s Security Agency (ISA). The film was nominated for an Academy Award, but didn’t win. Still Sony Pictures Classics distributed the film widely in the US, and Cinephil distributed it internationally.

Jump ahead to 2023

Zone of Interest won an Oscar for Best Feature Film in 2023. There was enthusiastic support for the film itself. It was, after all, about the Holocaust. But there was tremendous anger and antipathy by those who support Israel’s current genocide, after British Jewish director Jonathan Glazer gave his acceptance speech. Surrounded by several other men who helped create Zone of Interest, he noted,

“Right now we stand here as men who refute our Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people… all the victims of this dehumanisation. How do we resist?”

In Zone, Auschwitz arguably served as a stand-in for Gaza. Seven months after Israel began its genocidal war against Palestinians, Israel had killed more than 28,000, buried more than 10,000 Palestinian—mainly women and children — in the rubble of tens of housands of buildings that Israel bombed.

It has played in movie theatres around the world and streams on various platforms.

In 2024, Israelism, the documentary film in which two young American Jews question the way Israel treats Palestinians was able to land a US distributor, Watermelon Pictures. Watermelon, a new film production and distribution company, was founded to “showcase who have been poorly represented and dehumanized in mainstream media.” Israelism had been released the previous year, and the filmmakers managed to have hundreds of showings at universities and colleges in the US, plus online streaming. The pro-Israel Jews such as David Suissa at the right-wing Jewish Journal wrote,

“The film features a few carefully selected young American Jews complaining that their Jewish upbringing advocated for Israel but withheld any advocacy for Palestinians. To hear them, you’d think there was a total blackout in Jewish America on discussing the plight of the Palestinians, which is quite the opposite. … the movie wants us to believe that Zionist advocacy was so one-sided and all-consuming it created a generation of young Jews who, feeling duped, have turned against their own.”

We know that in the “official” Jewish world there is indeed a near-total blackout on representing and advocating for the Palestinian cause. Even in the world of film distribution, it took months for Israelism to get a distributor for theatrical and digital release.

The terror story of today – as whipped up by the pro-Israel lobby – is about the BBC’s latest censuring of its own documentary “Gaza: How to survive a war zone.” The film (co-produced with an outside film company) features four young teens in Gaza, in a “vivid and unflinching view of life in a war zone”, from Dec. 2024 to the “ceasefire” a month ago. The film’s narrator, Abdulla age 13, speaks good English. The BBC was frantic when it discovered Abdullah was the son of Hamas’ deputy minister of agriculture! Horror of horrors – the BBC chair actually noted the mistake was a “dagger to the heart” of the BBC’s impartiality. Seriously? BBC’s corporate leadership grovelled and apologized to a Parliamentary committee meeting for “failing to do its due diligence” on how the BBC creating a doc about life in Gaza– with no reference to Hamas.

For a very nice 6 minute message to the BBC by Abdulla, watch this.

The BBC executives’ top concern is making sure their “brand” is respected and seen as “trustworthy.” I suppose that means what four young teens have seen, have endured, have barely survived may be unreliable or at worst a pack of lies. Does anyone honestly believe that what Gaza’s children have endured is not tantamount to a form of torture, ethnic cleansing, severe trauma and worse? Well the BBC has deep-sixed the film.

We are on a teeter-totter in Canada (and the US) when it comes to being able to see films about the Palestinians’ reality – in Gaza or the West Bank. Certain films win awards, even Oscars – but when a film about the genocide cannot be shown in a theatre or streamed on TV there is no doubt that the pro-Israel lobby is still hard at work.

At the top: still from No Other Land, the two co-directors Basel (left) and Yuval. (credit: Antipode Films)

RESTACK