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The Absence of Gaza at BAFICI and Mar del Plata: A Silence That Challenges

Programming is not about being for or against something. A festival is not a space for propaganda — it’s a space for friction: a place where the audience’s gaze meets the contradictions of the world. But for that to happen, there must be a willingness to make people uncomfortable.

Por Mauro Lukasievicz

The Encampments (2025), de Kei Pritsker y Michael T Workman

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Alex Reynolds put it bluntly: “There can be no neutrality in the face of genocide.” Her decision to withdraw Horizontal from BAFICI should have been the starting point for a broader, more uncomfortable, and urgent conversation about the role of film festivals, the responsibility of programmers, and how easily silence gets whitewashed. Because while Gaza is turned into a field of ruins and open-air mass graves, while the Strip collapses under tons of bombs and millions of human beings are forced to move from one place to another in search of food, not a single film showing that horror from a Palestinian perspective is screened in Buenos Aires or Mar del Plata. Not a single frame shot by Palestinian directors appears in the lineup of Argentina’s two most important festivals. There is not a single space for a Palestinian voice to stand before an audience and force it to look at what it prefers not to see.

This year, at BAFICI, what was shown was 7.10 Sur Rojo, by Uriel Sokolowicz — a documentary about the October 7, 2023 attack in Israel, described by its producer as a tribute to Hamas’s victims and a humanitarian plea for the release of hostages. The film, it’s true, includes voices from both sides of the conflict, but it does not represent the narrative of Palestinian resistance, nor was it made by Palestinian filmmakers. Its existence is, in fact, the perfect mirror image of what’s missing: an uncomfortable gaze willing to expose the asymmetry of a people resisting while the Israeli war machine claims the lives of more than 37,000 people in just nine months, according to UN data. As Ezequiel Kopel wrote in an article for Nueva Sociedad: “The number of Palestinian deaths is unprecedented since 1948: two-thirds are women and minors under 18.” More than 80% of Gaza’s population has been displaced from their homes — in most cases multiple times — seeking refuge from bombings that level refugee camps, hospitals, and schools indiscriminately. According to Kopel, the Israeli offensive — backed politically and militarily by the United States and much of Europe — has destroyed 70% of the region’s housing infrastructure, plunging the Strip into a humanitarian catastrophe of biblical proportions: mass famine, outbreaks caused by contaminated water, improvised morgues in the courtyards of bombed hospitals. Meanwhile, the few Palestinian journalists who remain on the ground work under total siege: more than 100 reporters and photographers have been killed since October, making this massacre the deadliest attack on the press since records began. What Israel is doing in Gaza today, Kopel writes, “is the greatest act of barbarity of this century” — a genocide broadcast live, second by second, while much of the world, and much of our film festivals, choose to look away and offer only silence.

Alex Reynolds understood this better than anyone when she decided to withdraw her short film Horizontal from the festival. According to her letter, in the last six editions of BAFICI, 24 Israeli films were screened compared to just two from Arab countries. The disparity is obscene, especially in light of the urgency of the moment. And even more obscene is the silence: no media outlet covered the news of her withdrawal — not even Caligari, the very magazine publishing these lines today. No cultural website, no arts section, no film journalist bothered to ask why a filmmaker chose to pull her work from a public festival and denounce institutional complicity. Meanwhile, at the world’s major festivals, the issue is burning hot: at Dokufest, which is taking place these days, the opening film was the brilliant The Encampments, which focuses on the moment students flooded Columbia University’s lawn to build the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, demanding the university divest from U.S. and Israeli arms companies. At Locarno, Berlinale, Visions du Réel, and so many others, dozens of films, shorts, and projects like Some Strings — shown recently at FIDMarseille — zoom in on the genocide Israel is carrying out in slow motion, the systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure, and the annihilation of any chance for a dignified life in Gaza. Programming is not about being for or against something. A festival is not a space for propaganda — it’s a space for friction: a place where the audience’s gaze meets the contradictions of the world. But for that to happen, there must be a willingness to make people uncomfortable. The Mar del Plata Festival, under its current management, doesn’t even pretend anymore — its current trajectory is almost a red-carpet reality show. Its directors, who had never even set foot in the festival until they were appointed, spend their time covering the Golden Globes and shamelessly declare that the goal is to bring in celebrities. Nothing about discomfort, nothing about incomprehensible documentaries on faraway peoples, nothing about difficult questions that might make embassies or the government uncomfortable.

What should be alarming is not that 7.10 Sur Rojo was screened. No one denies that the October 7 massacre happened and caused deep pain. Horror is always horror, no matter where it comes from. What is intolerable is the total absence of the other side: Gaza razed to the ground, Rafah turned to dust, mass starvation, mutilated children, bombed hospitals, open mass graves while soldiers take selfies over corpses. All of that exists — and it’s being filmed. There are Palestinian filmmakers risking their lives to tell their stories with cell phones, borrowed cameras, footage salvaged from the rubble. There are journalists and collectives of filmmakers documenting from within a genocide that mainstream media reduces to impersonal numbers. And there’s also the not-so-hidden idea that this scorched land is not for Palestinians: Donald Trump, without shame, laid out his vision of redeveloping the territory and turning it into the “Middle East Riviera” — a plan that would require the forced displacement of about two million Palestinians to neighboring lands. All that material and that context are out there — premiering and being discussed at festivals around the world. What’s most disturbing is that this absence is not neutral. It is a constructed silence. A silence that reinforces the idea that going to a film festival is just about watching the latest films from our favorite directors and what we already know. In that sense, Alex Reynolds did what few dare to do: withdraw and say so. Her gesture was solitary but worth more than dozens of statements.

This is not about censoring Israeli directors or demanding mechanical quotas of representation. It’s about understanding that programming films about Palestine today is the bare minimum if we want to live up to the moment. It means creating a space for questions, discomfort, and debate.

Fuentes:

Artículo “Israel en su hora más oscura”, por Ezequiel de Kopel: https://www.nuso.org/articulo/israel-en-su-hora-mas-oscura/ 

Proyecto Some Strings: https://some-strings.org/ 

Comunicado Alex Reynolds: https://www.instagram.com/p/DIAzRhcKQKl/