Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid, whose comments terming ‘The Kashmir Files’ as “vulgar” and “propaganda” led to a row, 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 Mr Lapid said as jury chief, reported NDTV.
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This leaves only Sudipto Sen — the lone Indian filmmaker on the IFFI International Competition jury — claiming that Mr Lapid made the statement “in his personal capacity”.
“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 read.
“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.