De Britse geëngageerde regisseur Ken Loach heeft op het Filmfestival van Berlijn een ere-Gouden Beer voor zijn carrière gekregen. Ken Loach is bekend voor zijn culturele en academische boycott tegen Israël. Hieronder een recent interview voor Berlin’s Tagesspiegel.
“Berlin film festival honors Israel critic Loach” – i24news – 13/02/2014
Director Ken Loach, a vocal backer of a cultural boycott against Israel, receives a lifetime achievement award
The 64th Berlin film festival awarded Ken Loach, a veteran British director and prominent backer of a cultural boycott against Israel, an honorary Golden Bear prize for lifetime achievement on Thursday.
Loach, 77, who is well-known for his social activism and films about labor disputes, has publicly spoken out against Israel several times in the past. …
In a recent interview with Berlin’s Tagesspiegel newspaper, the veteran director, said he supported a boycott against Israel as it “breaks international agreements, fails to uphold the Geneva Convention, takes land to which it has no right, throws children in prison and lies to the world about its nuclear weapons.”
Loach told the paper he is in favor of an academic and cultural boycott because “it’s the only thing we can do” to pressurize Israel to give up what he termed “occupied land.”
The decision to honor Loach was slammed by German Jewish leaders, who called the decision “a disgrace.”
“Ken Loach uses his prominence to call for a cultural boycott of Israel, singling out the only democracy in the Middle East where there is complete freedom of expression. It is a disgrace that a prominent German film festival panders to a film producer who has distinguished himself through bigotry and the denial of the right to existence of Israel,” Deidre Berger, head of the Berlin office of the American Jewish Committee, told JTA.
In the past Loach had called for a boycott of the 2009 Edinburgh International Film Festival after learning an Israeli filmmaker had been invited.
The director, who is a vocal supporter of social and human rights issues, has also refused to attend the Tehran Film Festival as a measure of support for opponents of the Iranian regime.
In 2012, Loach turned down a lifetime achievement prize from a festival organized by Italy’s National Museum of Cinema in Turin, after learning that the museum’s cleaners and security service workers had been mistreated, threatened and sacked after protesting over salary cuts.
The 2014 International Film Festival in Berlin presented a retrospective of his work, featuring 10 Loach pictures, including his 1966 docu-drama “Cathy Come Home”, 2002 drug-trade expose “Sweet Sixteen”, and 2009’s “Looking for Eric” with former French football star Eric Cantona.
Loach has been honored in the past for his work, taking home the Palme d’Or top prize at Cannes in 2006 for “The Wind That Shakes The Barley,” set during the Irish war of independence and its ensuing civil war.
In a statement on the festival’s website, festival director Dieter Kosslick said the event would pay tribute to Loach’s brand of humanist cinema portraying the lives of working-class Britons and his outspoken political engagement.
He also praised Loach for his “profound interest in people and their individual fates, as well as his critical commitment to society…we greatly admire him for how he reflects on social injustices with humor in his films.”
The Berlin film festival, Europe’s first major cinema showcase of the year, is held from February 6-16.
http://www.i24news.tv/en/news/culture/140214-berlin-film-festival-honors-israel-critic-loach
http://www.deredactie.be/cm/vrtnieuws/cultuur%2Ben%2Bmedia/film/140213BerlinaleLoachEreBeer
i24news / JPost – foto: Britse filmregisseur Ken Loach [REUTERS]