Thousands protested at the Venice Film Festival, denouncing
Israel’s Gaza siege and shifting focus from cinema glamour to urgent
humanitarian concerns.
“The entertainment industry has the advantage of being followed a lot, and so they should take a position on Gaza,”
Marco Ciotola, a 31-year-old computer scientist from Venice, told AFP at the rally.
“I don’t say that everyone needs to say ‘genocide’, but at least everyone needs to take a position, because this is not a political situation. This is a human situation.”
“We all know what is happening and it’s not possible that it carries on,” said Claudia Poggi, a teacher holding a Palestinian flag as people shouted “Stop the Genocide!” and “Free Palestine.”
Due to an open letter criticizing the Israeli government and urging the festival to make a stronger statement against the conflict, the Gazawar was one of the primary topics of conversation in the run-up to the event.
According to organizers, more than 2,000 professionals in the film industry, including directors Guillermo del Toro and Todd Field, have signed the letter, which was written by an organization called Venice4Palestine.
In May, a similar event was held at the Cannes Film Festival.
“The objective of the letter was to bring Gaza and Palestine to the core of the public conversation in Venice and that is what has happened,”
Venice4Palestine co-founder and director Fabiomassimo Lozzi told AFP.
“We are amazed at the amount of reaction,”
he added.
“It was like people in our business were just waiting for someone to raise our voice.”
The collective, but not the open letter, had also requested that British actor Gerard Butler and Israeli actor Gal Gadot be excluded from the festival due to their prior backing of the Israeli military.
Lozzi defended the suggested boycott, but the festival has ruled out such a move—they are not anticipated anyway.
“I believe that it’s justified in the same way I believed about 40 years ago that it was justified boycotting artists who performed in South Africa at the height of the apartheid system,”
he said.
According to UN-reliable statistics from the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza, Israel has murdered at least 63,025 Palestinians since its invasion of Gaza almost two years ago, the majority of whom were civilians.
A famine has been declared by the UN in the region as a result of Israel's siege of about two million Palestinians.
The conflict began when Hamas attacked Israel in October 2023, killing 1,219 people, primarily civilians, according to an AFP count based on Israeli data.
How did festival security respond to demonstrators trying to reach the red carpet?
Police maintained a strong presence and blocked protesters
from getting directly onto the red carpet or into the main festival venue for
safety reasons. Despite organizers and hundreds of protesters marching toward
the festival, they were stopped about a kilometer away near the beachfront Lido
district.
Security kept the protest confined to public streets near the festival but did not allow access to the glitzy, exclusive festival zone. The demonstration remained peaceful and impactful, with chants and banners carried on outside the official festival space.
This type of security response aligns with standard festival practices aimed at preventing disruptions to scheduled events and controlling access to exclusive areas.