Portuguese director Pedro Costa is among a group of dozens of filmmakers from around the world, such as Aki Kaurismaki and André Téchiné, who have signed a letter calling for an end to the bombings in Gaza, reports the newspaper Liberation.
In a text with thirty signatories published in the online edition of the French daily, the filmmakers call for “an immediate end” to the “slaughter and cruelty” in the Gaza Strip, which has caused 21,822 deaths, most of them women, children and teenagers, since the beginning of the war on October 7, according to the Hamas government.
Christian Petzold, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Wang Bing, Victor Erice, Radu Jude, Abderrahmane Sissako Claire Denis and Navad Lapid are some of the other directors of various nationalities who have decided to join this call for an end to the bombardment of Gaza and the facilitation of humanitarian aid in the territory.
“The terrible violence of October 7 has plunged Israelis and Palestinians into a new episode of slaughter and cruelty. A massacre of extreme proportions is currently taking place in Gaza, killing thousands of women and children and destroying the minimum conditions of survival for an entire people,” write directors such as Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Walter Salles, Robert Guédiguian, Patricia Mazuy and Laurent Cantet.
In this context, they demand “an immediate end to the bombardment of Gaza, the creation of humanitarian corridors and the material means demanded by all international organizations, as well as the release of the hostages”.
Filmmakers Claire Simon, Jia Zhangke, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, Anand Patwardhan, Ira Sachs, Nobuhiro Suwa, Cédric Kahn, Arthur Harari, Philippe Faucon, Rithy Panh, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Corneliu Porumboiu and Lav Diaz also joined the appeal.
On Friday, South Africa formally accused Israel of crimes of genocide in the Palestinian enclave of Gaza before the International Court of Justice, the UN’s main judicial body, in The Hague.
In a statement, the Pretoria government said that a request had been made to the International Court of Justice to bring proceedings against Israel over alleged violations of its obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the “Genocide Convention”) in relation to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
Pretoria argued that South Africa “is bound by treaty to prevent the occurrence of genocide” as a signatory to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
The Israeli government reacted with “repudiation” to the accusation of “acts of genocide” by its forces in Gaza, brought before the International Court of Justice by South Africa, retorting that this country “cooperates with a terrorist organization”.
The Israeli strikes were launched in retaliation for an unprecedented attack by Hamas commandos that killed around 1,140 people in Israel, most of them civilians, according to the latest official Israeli figures, and took more than two hundred hostages.
