Clarion India
NEW DELHI – Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid, who termed controversial movie ‘The Kashmir Files’ as “vulgar” and “propaganda”, has now got support from three others jury members of the International Film Festival of India (IFFI), Goa.
A statement posted on Twitter by jury member Jinko Gotoh, along with Pascale Chavance and Javier Angulo Barturen as undersigned, said the entire jury knew — and agreed with — what Lapid said as jury chief.
This leaves only Sudipto Sen — the lone Indian filmmaker on the IFFI International Competition jury — claiming that Lapid made the statement “in his personal capacity”.
Lapid has since said he did not mean to deny the tragedy of Kashmiri Pandits, but had only commented on the movie’s “cinematic manipulations”, and that the tragedy “deserves a serious movie”.
This was underlined by the three fellow jurors in their joint statement.
“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 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,” it reads.
“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,” it added.
Jinko Gotoh is an Oscar-nominated American producer; Javier A Barturen, a documentary filmmaker and journalist from France; and Pascale Chavance is a film editor from France.
