The hip-hop film "Junction 48" represents Israel as a racist and violent state, but that did not stop the Tribeca Film Festival from honoring it. In fact, it probably helped.
The movie won its second award, Best International Narrative Feature at the festival Thursday in New York City. It won the Panorama Audience Award for best fiction film at the Berlin International Film Festival in February.
“Junction 48,” which stars mostly Palestinian actors, tells the story of an Arab rapper trying to carve out a career in the city of Lod. The film addresses anti-Arab bias in Israel and the relationship between music and politics.
The movie is unsubtle in its bashing of Israel -- likely the reason the Tribeca judges rewarded it.
Director Udi Aloni has made no secret of his negative views on Israel. He remarked that Germany should not supply submarines to Israel given its “fascist” government.
Aloni said he was against Israel’s government, not the state itself and argued that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spreads hatred.
The government’s racial segregation tops that of South Africa’s apartheid, the film director said.
A country that included both Palestinians and Israeli Jews “would liberate Israel from Zionism,” Aloni told Yedioth Achronoth in a 2010 interview.
“Instead of the dream of a Jewish state, we need to broaden this dream to Jews and Palestinians,” he commented.
Israel “is like Pakistan, which was founded by secular Muslims but gradually became a Taliban state as they lost control of power,” Aloni went on. “The same thing is happening in Israel.”
However, Pakistan is not surrounded by states sworn to wipe it off the map. Practitioners of Pakistan’s majority faith are not called apes and smeared with blood libel. Whatever Pakistan’s many problems, indiscriminate rocket attacks on residential neighborhoods is not one of them.
Israeli Culture and Sports Minister Miri Regev pushed back saying Aloni’s statements are “the ultimate proof that artists who undermine the country, who smear it and attack its legitimacy should not be funded at the taxpayer’s expense.”
“Junction 48” will be screened on Sunday in Manhattan at the Regal Cinemas Battery Park 11.
Actress Samar Qupty remarked, "It's still a revolutionary movie because it doesn't talk about the way we Palestinians are usually represented in the world.”
"We are representing ourselves by the new generation without trying to prove anything to anyone, with our 'goods' and 'bads'," she told Reuters.
