Feting of French filmmaker stirs ire
Adecision by Egypt’s prestigious film festival to honour veteran French director and writer Claude Lelouch has triggered an outcry in the country’s movie industry, for his alleged backing of Israel.
Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, but its professional unions continue to ban links with the Israeli regime or its backers.
Organisers of the Cairo Film Festival said this week that they will honour Lelouch next month at the event’s 40th edition. The decision prompted several Egyptian filmmakers and intellectuals to denounce the gesture, citing Lelouch’s frequent visits to Israel.
“The festival’s officials insist on honouring this director, who loves the Zionist entity [Israel] in a violation and defiance of the Federation of the Artistic Unions’ unanimous decision that rejects all forms of normalisation with the Zionist enemy,” a group of filmmakers and writers said in a statement yesterday.
“Claude Lelouch has long expressed pride in the Zionist entity considering it his real homeland and even joined exercises of the enemy’s army in November 1999 inside a colony,” the statement read.
Head of the festival Mohammad Hefzy shrugged off the criticism. “Accusations that Claude is a Zionist are baseless rumours,” Hefzy said. “He has no hostile stance against Arabs or Islam.” Hefzy defended the plan to honour Lelouch, saying: “We should not consider every director or artist, who visited Israel, is a foe of Arabs.”