Lapid’s fellow foreign jurors back ‘The Kashmir Files’ remark – Times of India

In a joint statement issued through social media, BAFTA winner and Oscar-nominated American producer Jinko Gotoh, award-winning film critic and journalist Pascale Chavance, and Javier Angulo Barturen, said, ‘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 us 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.”

Nadav, the president of the International Competition Section at the 53rd IFFI, not only irked The Kashmir Files filmmakers with his remarks, but also the Israeli diplomatic mission in India and triggered a blistering attack from the right-wing, which sought to portray his remarks as dismissive of the exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits from the Kashmir valley in the 1990s.

The Golden Bear-winning Israeli filmmaker, however, clarified in successive interviews to Israeli and Indian news outfits, that his comments were limited to the quality of the film, not the events portrayed in it. Apologising for hurting sentiments if his remarks had been misconstrued, Lapid said that he stood by his statement that ‘The Kashmir Files’ is a vulgar, propaganda movie that was entirely inappropriate for a prestigious competitive section at IFFI. He also said that everyone on the jury was aware of what he was going to say at the closing ceremony.

Gotoh, Chavance and Barturen agreed with Nadav. “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 Naday. That was never the intention of the jury,” their signed statement added.

Interestingly, while Indian filmmaker Sudipto Sen had distanced himself from Lapid’s statements at the closing ceremony and called them his personal opinion, he acknowledged later that ‘The Kashmir Files’ was unanimously rejected by the jury on artistic grounds. He maintained though that he disagreed with Lapid’s remarks.