The mayor of Miami Beach, Fla., is threatening to boot a nonprofit art house cinema from city-owned property over its decision to screen the Academy Award-winning documentary “No Other Land.”
The Miami Herald reported that Mayor Steven Meiner wrote in a Tuesday newsletter to the city’s residents that he believes the film, which addresses the longstanding conflict between Israelis and Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, promotes antisemitism and that leaders from O Cinema on South Beach reneged on an agreement with him to prevent its showing.
“I am a staunch believer in free speech,” Meiner, who is Jewish, wrote in his newsletter. “But normalizing hate and then disseminating antisemitism in a facility owned by the taxpayers of Miami Beach after O Cinema conceded the ‘concerns of antisemitic rhetoric,’ is unjust to the values of our city and residents and should not be tolerated.”
He has called for the city to terminate its lease with the theater and stop future grant payments.
According to the Herald, city commissioners are expected to vote on legislation to do that at a meeting next week.
Meiner’s office didn’t immediately respond to The Hill’s request for comment. The theater’s website currently lists four upcoming screenings of the film on March 19-20.
O Cinema CEO Vivian Martell defended showing the film and said the decision is not intended to be a political statement.
“It is, however, a bold reaffirmation of our fundamental belief that every voice deserves to be heard, even, and perhaps especially, when it challenges us,” Martell said in an email to The Herald.
“No Other Land” was made through a collaboration between Jewish and Palestinian filmmakers. It won the best documentary feature award at the Oscars ceremony on March 2, where its backers called for unity and an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“There is a different path, a political solution without ethnic supremacy, with national rights for both of our people,” Israeli filmmaker Yuval Abraham said in his acceptance speech.
The documentarians spent four years on the film about a destroyed West Bank village. Production wrapped shortly before Hamas’s deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israeli citizens, sparking the war in Gaza.
“We made this film, Palestinians and Israelis, because together, our voices are stronger,” Abraham said in his speech. “We see each other, the atrocious destruction of Gaza and its people, which must end, the Israeli hostages brutally taken in the crime of October 7, which must be freed.”
