Palestine Action documentary makers fear being criminalised under anti-terror laws

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Exclusive: Directors of To Kill a War Machine take legal advice as Home Office plans to proscribe protest group The makers of an award-winning documentary about Palestine Action say they fear they will be criminalised if they continue distributing the work after the group is banned under anti-terror laws. The online release of To Kill a War Machine was brought forward to this week after it emerged that the Home Office was going to proscribe the protest group, which takes direct action against Israeli arms companies in the UK. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/HmaYpqL via IFTTT
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‘We need to do something’: the company releasing Palestinian films no one else will

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As many films struggle to find distribution, Watermelon Pictures has stepped in to help tell stories from Palestine and other marginalized communities

In March, The Encampments, a documentary on the pro-Palestinian protest movement on US college campuses, opened at the Angelika Film Center in New York. The nonfiction theatrical marketplace has never been breezy in the US, but this is a particularly difficult time for documentaries, let alone films about hot-button issues considered politically sensitive or, under the new administration, outright dangerous; one of the Encampments’ primary subjects, the Columbia University student-activist Mahmoud Khalil, remains in detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) without charge for any crime. Large-scale distributors, including all of the major streaming services, are increasingly wary of anything deemed controversial, leaving such films as Union, on the Amazon Labor Union, or the Oscar-winning Palestinian-Israeli documentary No Other Land without distribution in the US.

Nevertheless, over an exclusive first-weekend run, The Encampments made $80,000 at the Angelika – the highest per-screen average for a documentary since the Oscar-winning Free Solo in 2018. That number may sound like peanuts compared with, say, the multimillion theatrical haul of a Marvel movie, but it’s a significant win for the specialty box office – and validation for a film whose mere existence, as a pro-Palestinian narrative, led to threats of violence at the Angelika, an incident of vandalism in the theater’s lobby and social media censorship of its ads.

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