TO THE VENICE BIENNALE
THE VENICE FILM FESTIVAL
ALL FILM, MEDIA AND CULTURE WORKERS
AND YET GAZA KEEPS BURNING
A year has passed...
A year ago, thousands of people answered the call from Venice4Palestine to place Palestine in the spotlight at the Film Festival and bring the Palestinian people’s resistance to the center of public discourse: finally, there was open talk of genocide rather than war. While we urged the Biennale and the Festival to take a clear stand and called on film workers to express their solidarity, the screening of Sawt Hind Rajab (The Voice of Hind Rajab) during the festival seemed to suddenly embody those demands, sparking a collective outpouring of emotion and outrage. In the days and weeks that followed—as part of the wave of popular consciousness that had emerged—millions of us took to the streets and to the seas in solidarity with the Palestinian people. A surge of participation gave us hope that, together, we could help stop the genocide.
Instead, a “new normal” has taken hold—aided by a sham ceasefire. Israel has not only failed to stop but has continued its atrocities, expanding its firepower toward the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon, and Iran. Nothing has changed for the Palestinian people, and the tears we have shed over a film are not enough to absolve us; rather, they are proof that we are failing to harness our collective agency with sufficient strength.
Palestine reminds us that “another world is possible.”
Twenty-five years ago, we experienced the collective trauma of Genoa 2001. We witnessed one of the most severe suspensions of democracy. Expressions of dissent were silenced with unspeakable violence—a slaughter deliberately staged as a demonstration of power, intended to imprint a specific directive on our collective memory for the future: remembering the bloodshed in order to forget the ideas expressed by a global community to change the world. We see the results of that vast laboratory of repression increasingly at work today in Italy and in many other states that claim to be democratic. The oppressive bullying of ourgovernments, the repressive actions of their armed forces, our freedom being increasingly eroded by new security laws, and the false narratives spread by complicit media form a wall against which demands for justice, equity, and reciprocity are shattered. Yet, however tragic and bitter it may seem, the Palestinian resistance has reconnected us with the idea that “another world is possible.” The Palestinian people continue to resist and create, to recount the reality of the present at the risk of their lives, to preserve memory, and to nurture the possibility of a different, more just tomorrow: we have a duty to embrace and put this lesson into practice. Militarized cities and unconstitutional laws that criminalize dissent betray the fear felt by a dehumanizing system when confronted with the strength of a conscious and determined collective. We must not, therefore, let these reprisals paralyze or divide us. The intensification of repression is proof that our actions are having an impact. We must, therefore, persist.
It has already happened. It is happening now.
Dockworkers are blocking arms shipments, asserting their right to conscientious objection as a safeguard against baseless accusations and disciplinary measures. At the Venice Art Biennale—thanks in part to the efforts of ANGA (Art Not Genocide Alliance)—the international jury resigned en masse, and workers protested the opening of the Israeli pavilion, staging a strike for the first time in the institution’s history. In international waters the Global Sumud Flotilla challenged the Israeli siege, turning solidarity into concrete action and thus forcing a criminal state into revealing its true face. These fights are all moving in the same direction: a refusal to be cogs in the machinery of normalization.
A call to the Mostra and to our colleagues:
As workers in the film, audiovisual and cultural sectors, we believe it is time to organize collective action to make a concrete impact on the mechanisms of complicity and normalization.