Pedro Pascal and Juliette Binoche add their names to Cannes letter condemning 'genocide' in Gaza
Earlier this week, a group of more than 350 international actors, directors and producers signed a letter published on the first day of the Cannes Film Festival condemning the killing of Fatma Hassona, the 25-year-old Palestinian photojournalist and protagonist of the documentary Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk.
Hassouna was killed along with 10 relatives in an Israeli air strike on her family home in northern Gaza last month, the day after the documentary was announced as part of the ACID Cannes selection.
The signatories included Pedro Almodóvar, Ruben Östlund, Guy Pierce, Ralph Fiennes, Melissa Barrera, Yórgos Lánthimos, Susan Sarandon, Alfonso Cuarón and David Cronenberg. They denounced genocide in Gaza: "We cannot remain silent while genocide is taking place in Gaza," read the letter initiated by several pro-Palestinian activist groups and published in French newspaper Libération and US magazine Variety.
'We are ashamed of such passivity.'
The letter also urged cinema to use its art form to 'draw lessons from history, to make films that are committed' and to be 'present to protect oppressed voices.'
Now, 60 more artists and celebrities have added their names to the letter condemning the film industry for its 'silence' over the ongoing and deadly impact of Israel's military campaign in Gaza – including this year's Cannes jury president Juliette Binoche, Pedro Pascal, Guillermo del Toro, Noémie Merlant and Omar Sy.
Other new signatories also include Riz Ahmed, Tomas Alfredson, Carter Burwell, Robin Campillo, Camille Cottin, Adèle Haenel, Jim Jarmusch, Michael Moore, Alice Rohrwacher and Peter Straughan.
Read the full letter below:
Fatma Hassona was 25 years old.
She was a Palestinian freelance photojournalist. She was targeted by the Israeli army on 16 April 2025, the day after it was announced that Sepideh Farsi's film 'Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk,' in which she was the star, had been selected in the ACID section of the Cannes Film Festival.
She was about to get married.
Ten of her relatives, including her pregnant sister, were killed by the same Israeli strike.
Since the terrible massacres of 7 October 2023, no foreign journalist has been authorised to enter the Gaza Strip. The Israeli army is targeting civilians. More than 200 journalists have been deliberately killed. Writers, film-makers and artists are being brutally murdered.
At the end of March, Palestinian filmmaker Hamdan Ballal, who won an Oscar for his film 'No Other Land,' was brutally attacked by Israeli settlers and then kidnapped by the army, before being released under international pressure. The Oscar Academy's lack of support for Hamdan Ballal sparked outrage among its own members and it had to publicly apologize for its inaction.
We are ashamed of such passivity.
Why is it that cinema, a breeding ground for socially committed works, seems to be so indifferent to the horror of reality and the oppression suffered by our sisters and brothers?
As artists and cultural players, we cannot remain silent while genocide is taking place in Gaza and this unspeakable news is hitting our communities hard.
What is the point of our professions if not to draw lessons from history, to make films that are committed, if we are not present to protect oppressed voices?
Why this silence?
The far right, fascism, colonialism, anti-trans and anti-LGBTQIA+, sexist, racist, islamophobic and antisemitic movements are waging their battle on the battlefield of ideas, attacking publishing, cinema and universities, and that's why we have a duty to fight.
Let's refuse to let our art be an accomplice to the worst.
Let us rise up.
Let us name reality.
Let us collectively dare to look at it with the precision of our sensitive hearts, so that it can no longer be silenced and covered up.
Let us reject the propaganda that constantly colonizes our imaginations and makes us lose our sense of humanity.
For Fatma, for all those who die in indifference.
Cinema has a duty to carry their messages, to reflect our societies.
Let's act before it's too late.
When asked about the open letter at the Cultural Council in Brussels earlier this week, French minister of culture Rachida Dati told Euronews: 'It is their role to engage and to have a commitment. I believe that culture and politics go hand in hand. It can be exceptional, when we are committed to creative freedom - because as you know, at the moment there are more and more attacks on creativity. That's why I want to create a senior civil servant for creative freedom.'
She added: 'I have taken measures to prevent these attacks on creativity, including many programmers and curators who no longer want to select films. There is more and more self-censorship when it comes to programming. And so, we have to commit to this freedom of creation, we have to prevent obstacles to the freedom of creation, and artists have a role to play in taking sides, in mobilising in relation to what is happening in the world.'
Concluding, she shared: 'Personally, I'd be very surprised if the cultural and artistic players weren't mobilised and committed. That's what culture and politics are for. It is said that music softens morals - culture can also save the world. So, I think that everyone is doing their part.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
8 hours ago
- Yahoo
Snapping Tel Aviv: Alex Levac on capturing the city that never sleeps
Israel's city that never sleeps was founded over Passover, 1909, during the counting of the Omer leading up to Shavuot. Photographer Alex Levac sees things the average person on the street doesn't catch. When we meet up at his Tel Aviv apartment, a stone's throw away from the beach, I ask the evergreen octogenarian, who was awarded the Israel Prize for his groundbreaking photography 20 years ago, where the notion of snapping incongruous yet complementary overlaps first emerged. 'I don't know. Perhaps I got it from the French photographers, like Robert Doisneau and Henri Cartier-Bresson,' he suggests bringing the lauded humanist documentarists into the philosophical equation. 'But, it was mostly a British photographer called Tony Ray-Jones.' Those men were powerful sources of inspiration, who shined a bright light on his own path to visual expression, Levac says. 'I didn't invent anything. You know, you see something you like and you think, 'I'll try to do something like that.'' The above lauded trio may have sparked the young Israeli's imagination and sowed the seeds for one of his main lines of thought and endeavor, but it was something of a slow burner. 'I left Israel for London in late 1967,' he says. 'I left Israel for a year and stayed 14 years. But I came back from time to time, to visit family and friends.' And snap a few frames, he may have added. Levac studied photography in London in its Swinging Sixties heyday, and subsequently worked in the field in Britain. But the time and, in particular, the place were not aligned with Levac's native cultural continuum. 'I don't think, then, I looked for these [idiosyncratic] confluences. That didn't interest me outside the Israeli context.' But the idea of getting into that after he returned here to roost was gestating just below the surface. 'I thought that it was more interesting to do in Israel because I am more familiar with the culture and the visual language.' Evidently, there is more to what Levac does than observing quotidian jigsaw pieces align themselves and pressing the shutter release button at exactly the right happenstance microsecond. 'It is not just a combination of all sorts of anecdotal elements. There is, here, also a statement about the Israeli public domain.' The dynamics of human behavior, of course, can vary a lot between differing societies. In Israel, we are much more physically expressive than the average Brit or, for that matter, Japanese. ONCE RESETTLED in the Middle East, the mix-and-match line of photography soon took on tangible form, without too much premeditation. 'I don't remember exactly when it started but I took one of the first shots one day when I was in Ashkelon. I lived there at the time with my first wife. I started seeing a lot of contrasts on the street, coming together at the same time.' It was around that time that still largely conservative Israel got its first tabloid newspaper, Hadashot, which shook up the industry and Israeli society, and introduced it to risqué material and full-color photographs. Levac was soon on board and, before too long, also found himself in hot water as a result of the now-famous news picture he took. 'That was Kav 300 (Bus 300),' he recalls. The said snap was of a terrorist being led away from the scene after IDF soldiers stormed an Egged bus in which passengers were being held captive. The initial official IDF report was that all four Palestinian terrorists had been killed in the attack. However, Levac's picture provided irrefutable evidence that one of the terrorists was still alive after the operation was over. 'They shut the paper down for a while after that.' Brief hiatus notwithstanding, Levac had, by then, established himself as a bona fide photojournalist here. 'I had a regular column in a Hadashot supplement called 'Segol' (purple). They had very visual-oriented editors at the time, so photographers were given a lot of column space. Then I got my regular weekly spot. I've been doing that for around 40 years, every single week. That's crazy!' That may be wonderful, but it comes with a commitment to produce the visually left-field goods, week in and week out. 'Sometimes I can just pop out and I'll find something really good, very quickly. Other times, it can take a while, and there are times I come back without having taken a photograph,' he says. After all these years, Levac's sixth sense is constantly primed and ready to pick up on some unexpected sequence of events that could fuse into an amusing or captivating frame. Anyone who has seen his candid snaps, which have been running in the Haaretz newspaper for the past three-plus decades, will have a good idea of his special acumen for noting and documenting surprising, and often humorous, street-level juxtapositions. 'By now, I see those kinds of things more than I see the ordinary stuff,' he smiles. 'I also look for that, like Gadi.' GADI ROYZ is a hi-tech entrepreneur and enthusiastic amateur photographer. Levac recalls that 'Gadi came up to me one day and told me he'd attended a lecture of mine and began taking photographs,' he recalls. At first, Levac wasn't sure where it was leading. 'You know, you get nudniks telling me how much they like my photographs and all that,' he chuckles. 'You have to be nice when people do that, but it can get a bit tiresome.' However, it quickly became clear that Royz was in a different league and had serious plans for the two of them. 'Gadi didn't just want to be complimentary; he said, 'Let's do a book together.'' Producing a book with high-quality prints can be a financially challenging business. But, it seems, Royz didn't just bring boundless enthusiasm and artistic talent to the venture; he also helped with the nuts and bolts of putting the proposition into attractive corporeal practice. In fact, the book, which goes by the intriguing name of A City of Refuge, is a co-production together with Royz, who, judging by his around 40 prints in the book, also has a gift for discerning the extraordinary in everyday situations, and capturing them to good aesthetic and compelling effect. The city in question is, of course, Tel Aviv, where Levac was born and has lived for most of his life. 'Gadi said he had the money to get the book done,' Levac notes. That sounded tempting, but Levac still wanted to be sure the end product would be worth the effort. 'We sat down together, and I saw some of his photographs. I liked them, so I said, 'Let's go for it.'' And so A City of Refuge came to be. There are around 100 prints in the plushly produced volume. All offer fascinating added visual and cerebral value. There is always some surprise in store for the viewer, although it can take a moment to absorb it, which, in this day and age of lightning speed instantaneous gratification, is a palliative boon. The unlikely interfaces, which can be topical or simply contextually aesthetic, may be comical, arresting, or even a little emotive. Every picture demands a moment or two of your time and, as Levac noted in the dedication he generously wrote for me in my copy of the book, can be revisited for further pondering and enjoyment. The book is great fun to leaf through. One of Levac's more sophisticated items shows a man sitting on a bench with a serious expression on his face, which is echoed and amplified by a childish figure on the wall behind him of a character with a look of utter glumness. There's a smile-inducing shot by Royz (following in Levac's photographic footsteps) with a young, heavily pregnant woman walking from the left, about to pass behind a spiraling tree trunk with a hefty protrusion of its own. Royz also has a classic picture of Yaacov Agam's famed fire and water sculpture, in its original polychromic rendition in Dizengoff Square of several years ago. The picture shows two workers cleaning the work, each on a different level. The worker on the top level is visible from his stomach upward, while his colleague, on the street level, can only be seen from his waist down. Together, they looked like an extremely elongated character, something along the lines of a Tallest Man in the World circus performer. It is often a matter of camera angle, such as Royz's shot of a wheelie bin in Yarkon Park with a giant hot balloon-looking orb looking like it is billowing out of the trash can. And Levac's delightfully crafted frame of an elegant, long-haired blonde striding along the sidewalk led by her sleek canine pal, which appears to have an even more graceful step, poses a question about the human-animal grace divide. I wondered whether, in this day and age if – when we all take countless photos with our smartphones, of everything and everyone around us – his job has become harder. 'Quite the opposite,' he exclaims. 'Now that everyone takes pictures, people notice me less, which means I can do what I want and snap with greater freedom.' Long may that continue. ■
Yahoo
8 hours ago
- Yahoo
Michael Jackson's Daughter Paris's Glamorous Cannes 2025 Look Is Giving Vintage Vibes
Michael Jackson's daughter, Paris Jackson, is the talk of the town when it comes to the Cannes red carpet, and we're obsessed. At the 78th annual Cannes Film Festival on May 23, Paris arrived in an Old Hollywood-inspired look that has brought fans to their knees. For the Honey Don't! red carpet, Paris turned heads, and reminded everyone that she's a modern-day fashion icon. See the photos below: More from SheKnows Cynthia Nixon Stole the Show at the And Just Like That Photo Call in This Voluminous Mint Gown For the rare red carpet moment, Paris wowed in a sparkling, high-slit brown gown from Vivienne Westwood. We see so many of her gorgeous tattoos on display as she dons pointed brown heels and a matching pair of gloves. Along with that, she paired the look with crystal-clad jewels, delicate rings, as well as a bronzed eye-makeup look that brought out her blue eyes and platinum blonde locks. Truly, this is one of her best looks to date, and the rare moment may show a new change to her usual red carpet style. Along with being a talented actress and singer, the fashion icon has stayed true to herself over the years. She previously told LVR about her eclectic personal style, saying, 'I have had the same style since high school: a combination of Sixties, Seventies, and Nineties.' And in another previous interview, she talked about how doing herself up with has become a simple act of self-love. 'Recently, I've learned how to cope with it all by practicing self-love and affirmations and diving deeper into my spiritual life,' she said. 'It wasn't until the last couple of years that I've started feeling really good about myself and my body, and feeling comfortable and everything. Those moments of self-love aren't 24/7, but the bad moments are fewer and further between.' Best of SheKnows Elizabeth Hurley & Billy Ray Cyrus, & More of the Best Red Carpet Debuts From Celebrity Couples Over the Years Yoko Ono's Daughter Kyoko, & 22 Surprising Celebrities That Were In or Linked to a Cult 7 Ways Chrissy Teigen Has Altered Her Appearance Over the Years: Plastic Surgery & More
Yahoo
11 hours ago
- Yahoo
Variety report claims 'The Boys' and 'Handmaid's Tale' imaginary fascist worlds are becoming reality
Michael Schneider, executive editor for Variety's TV section, claimed in an article published Friday that the imaginary fascist worlds of Amazon Prime's "The Boys" and Hulu's "The Handmaid's Tale" are becoming reality. Schneider argued the fictitious worlds created in the TV series "don't seem so far-fetched anymore" in President Donald Trump's America. "The Boys," a TV series based on a group of superheroes who cause more chaos than they do good, recently rolled out a marketing campaign jokingly referring to the show as a documentary. In a 2022 interview with Rolling Stone, showrunner Eric Kripke confirmed the series' "evil-Superman-style character," Homelander, was created as a "direct Trump analogue." The Variety editor wrote that the superhero series "feels a lot less fictional every season it's on the air." 'Handmaid's Tale' Showrunners Say Their Series' 'Warning' Was 'Ignored' Based On Trump's Re-election "That's why the cheeky 'The Boys' ads tout its campaign for 'Best Documentary Series.'" he wrote. "Sure, the 'documentary' is crossed out, and 'drama' is hastily written above it, like it was a last-minute mistake. But we've been making that joke for years." Read On The Fox News App Schneider then shifted his focus to "The Handmaid's Tale," claiming the frightening events that take place in the series "don't seem so far-fetched anymore." He featured quotes from the show's creators to reinforce his point that the authoritarian dystopia featured in the series is now becoming reality. The show's executive producer, Eric Tuchman, recalled that some writers for the show were concerned about the possibility of Roe v. Wade being overturned when Trump won the presidency in 2016. He felt that it sounded "kind of alarmist and extremist … I could not have been more wrong, obviously." Tuchman claimed the show's creators weren't focused on calling attention to "the political situation in the country," but said "it was just uncanny how much it ended up being a mirror of what was happening in the real world." Another showrunner, Yahlin Chang, said before she joined the production, she "did all this research into what happens when parents and children are separated in conflict zones." She conducted this research in preparation for a scene in which one of the characters is allowed to visit her estranged daughter for only 10 minutes under government supervision. America Now Worse Than 'Make Believe' 'Handmaid's Tale' Because Of Abortion, Actress Claims "My research focused on conflict zones like Liberia, Cambodia, Bosnia. I never imagined that that would happen in our own country. But by the time I wrote this scene in 2017, and by the time it aired in 2018, it aired the week that we were separating parents and children at the border," Chang said. She claimed "by doing research on what authoritarian regimes do," the show's creators "somehow predicted what would happen" in the real world. Click Here For More Coverage Of Media And Culture Schneider noted that, "Ironically, just as things get even worse here in the United States," the imaginary land of Gilead in the series is poised for a revolution. In closing, the Variety editor left readers with his hopes for the future. "A revolution and a happy ending for 'The Handmaid's Tale?' Here's hoping the real world can imitate art in this way, too," Schneider article source: Variety report claims 'The Boys' and 'Handmaid's Tale' imaginary fascist worlds are becoming reality
