Producer Glib Lukianets of Gogol Film has defended Palestinian director Mohammed Almughanni against the charges of antisemitism levelled at him following comments made at International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) last month.
Almughanni’s debut documentary feature Son Of The Streets, produced by Lukianets and commissioned by BBC Storyville, won the best pitch prize at the IDFA Forum, the festival’s co-production and co-financing industry event.
However, on stage during his pitch, the filmmaker used the phrase ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’. The slogan has become a rallying cry of pro-Palestinian protests during the ongoing war. But it is a contentious phrase considered anti-Semitic by some, a call for an independent Palestinian state by others.
While on stage, the Gaza-born director added: “I also thought a lot about this statement and everything – and I just think if you endorse me as a filmmaker, showing the pain of Palestinians but you don’t endorse them having a life with dignity, that means nothing to me, the film means nothing to me. And if you endorse my film by giving me money, I don’t care if you don’t endorse a free Palestine and a good life for these people.”
BBC Storyville commissioning editor Emma Hindley hugged and consoled him after his pitch.
Now, Hindley is being criticised for having done so and there has been a spate of articles in the UK press in recent days drawing attention to her actions. The row over Hindley’s actions has been intensified by the ongoing debate over the BBC’s Israel-Gaza coverage since the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7 and the Israeli reprisals. The UK public broadcaster has been accused both of antisemitism and pro-Israel bias.
Hindley was not available to comment but has issued a statement, which said: “I hugged Mohammed because he was visibly distressed. Hugging him wasn’t a political statement or an endorsement of anybody’s views, it was an instinctive human reaction. I’m sorry if my actions have upset anyone – my intentions were quite the opposite.”
A BBC spokesperson added: “Emma’s actions were a human response to the director… who became visibly distressed during the pitch and were not in any way an endorsement of his views.”
One documentary executive who attended the pitch told Screen that Hindley’s actions were a “mistake” and risked compromising BBC Storyville’s reputation for impartiality.
“If she [Hindley] genuinely felt bad for him and wanted to give him a hug, she is a senior leader in the BBC and should have recognised that that is not the right thing to do in public,” said the executive. “She should have done it in private afterwards.”
However, the film’s Ukrainian-Polish producer Lukianets took a different perspective.
“It wasn’t like he came up to the stage and was pushing some political position. No way,” the producer insisted. “His intentions are very humanistic. That I can tell you for sure. He is a very humanistic person, a very kind person, very empathetic.”
He said that Almughanni had used the slogan ‘From the river to the sea’ in response to the protesters who had carried a banner with the same phrase when they disrupted the IDFA opening ceremony.
The filmmaker’s family is in Gaza, which remains under Israeli attack.
“It was his attempt to start a kind of dialogue,” said Lukianets. “He [Almughanni] was emotional. For him, being in IDFA was already a kind of stress. All the time for the last two months he was totally engaged by watching news and trying to help his family… for me, it [the director’s pitch] was the idea of… let’s find a solution, let’s start talking.”
The producer added that Almughanni “just wanted to share his feelings” and did not want to talk only about his “project, the characters, the financing”.
Real-life story
Son Of The Streets was commissioned last year by BBC Storyville and is currently in post-production. The BBC intends to transmit it next year.
The documentary is about 13-year-old Khodor who has grown up in the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut, Lebanon as the son of a raped woman who, because of that, did not want to register the father’s name on the birth certificate. He has no legal ID and as a result, no rights to education, healthcare or movement outside of the camp.
As his mother and father are both dead, despite his surviving family’s attempts to get him an ID document that proves his existence, the process is problematic and many old family secrets and tensions emerge.
The film is produced by Almughanni for Gaza Films and Lukianets for Gogol Film. The executive producer is Rashid Abdelhamid for Made in Palestine Project. Financiers include the Polish Film Institute, Doha Film Institute, Arab Fund for Arts and Culture, Lodz Film Commission, Palestinian Cultural Fund and IMS. Sales are handled by Paris-based Mediawan Rights.
The controversy over Son Of The Streets was one of several disputes relating to the Israel-Gaza conflict during a fractious IDFA this year. Several filmmakers withdrew their documentaries from the programme and the festival faced protests and complaints from both the Israeli film community and Palestinian delegates in attendance.
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