Statement Regarding the Cancellation of Our Theme Program
for 2024 Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen

bit.ly/oberhausen-program-cancellation
 

November 20, 2023

As the curators of the featured theme program for the 70th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen), we are disappointed that our program was canceled by festival director Lars Henrik Gass in retaliation of our signing of the letter “Message to the international film community, regarding a recent statement from the director of Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen”.

To summarize: On October 20th, Gass commented on the official Facebook page of the festival demonizing the Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim residents of a Berlin neighborhood as “Hamas friends and Jew haters” (“Hamasfreunde und Judenhasser”), and calling for Germans to rally in support of Israel in this largely immigrant community. In response, an open letter was posted on November 1st at internationalfilmcommunity.noblogs.org. This was not a call to boycott the festival, but rather a public response by a collective of artists and cultural workers who were attempting to hold an organization we respect to account and to take responsibility for hurtful language. We agreed with the concerns raised in the letter, and were confused as to why the festival’s official social media channel would be used as a platform for distributing such a message. Gass’s follow-up statement on November 3rd was, in our opinion, insufficient and failed to address the letter’s primary concerns.

Further, prior to the cancellation of our program, we were told by Gass that our invitation to an Arab artist to present a performance at the festival as part of our program would not be honored by Gass (and thus the festival) because the artist had signed a BDS statement. Gass also claimed that the artist, who he doesn’t personally know, “[did not] have a necessary distance to Hamas.”

We have a history with the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen—one of the largest festivals in the world for short film—and were looking forward to being guest curators for the next edition. I (Astria) curated a special program for their 50th anniversary edition 19 years ago, which both of us attended. We also attended this year’s festival, and have found the programming and community inspiring and invigorating.

Our program, “The Game is Not the Thing: Sport and the Moving Image from Pre-Cinema to Post-Internet” proposed to challenge and expand commonplace understandings of the sports film genre by focusing on artist- and amateur-made media and counter-narratives rather than commercial documentary and fiction sports films—which often service hagiographic or nationalistic agendas. As we write in our program description, “The paradoxical nature of sport—as a site of biopolitical control, collective struggle, and individualized fantasy—makes it a rich and captivating subject. Spanning thirteen decades of production, this slate of programs examines mediated sport through a more inclusive framework. By engaging a diversity of approaches and perspectives, the series seeks to address some of the unseen political and economic flows of the globalized sports-media complex.”

Since being contracted in February of this year to curate the 2024 theme program (and following nearly a year of discussion, exchange of ideas, and the creation of a concept draft and mediagraphy), we have been preparing eight film screening and performance programs, a panel discussion for the Podium event, and potential gallery installations. To date, we have invested a year and a half of work towards the multi-event series, including viewing hundreds of media works and contacting dozens of filmmakers, artists, distributors, and artist estates.

Gass is now withholding a payment for work we submitted prior to the cancelation of our program.

We are dismayed and saddened by the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen’s inability to adequately respond to what we believe is a reasonable request from the global film community (with over 1900 signatories to the letter, including filmmakers, curators and programmers, critics, and distributors) to address the inflammatory nature of Lars Henrik Gass’s language. Maligning Palestinians as “friends” to terrorists is Islamophobic. We cannot stand for these harmful, racist statements. We believe cultural institutions and their leaders must be accountable to the communities that they represent and act on behalf of. Film festivals are not neutral.

Sincerely,

Brett Kashmere

Filmmaker, writer, curator, Oakland, California

Astria Suparak

Artist and curator, Oakland, California