Letter of the day: Rima Hassan at Black Movie

Geneva, January 15

We were enthusiastic about the programming of the Black Movie festival which this year will highlight cinema against a backdrop of conflict, with a particular focus on Nigerian cinema. As the artistic director points out in the “Tribune de Genève”, cinema must reflect a world where freedoms are threatened, while highlighting courage and poetry in the face of extremism. It was therefore with astonishment that we learned of the invitation of Rima Hassan by the festival organizers.

Rima Hassan, in her words, is an angry woman, and this anger fuels her fight for Palestine and its right to self-determination, as well as for the right of refugees to exist in their own identity. We understand this fight and support it. On the other hand, Rima Hassan’s reading of the world is in black and white and boils down to a binary balance of power between the powerful and the oppressed, simplifying the story and depriving of empathy the identity she has designated as guilty, without any distinction within the group. His obsession with Israel, coupled with a persistent silence on the Assad regime – a regime denounced for systematic human rights violations – is particularly disturbing, as there is such a double standard.

The festival’s choice to invite an activist who had been the subject of complaints for comments deemed violent and ambiguous, for the dissemination of fake news inciting hatred, and for having qualified the Hamas attack of October 7, including rape of women and murder of children, acts of resistance, poses a serious problem. This ideological positioning, present in certain decolonial collectives, which prioritizes violence according to the victim, even if it means obscuring crimes against humanity, maintains confusion as to what is ethical or moral and seems in contradiction with the objective of a festival subsidized by the State, which in partnership with the Department of Public Education (DIP), offers Geneva secondary schools a program aimed at raising awareness among young people of social and current themes.

Consequently, we find Rima Hassan’s invitation to speak alone at this event shocking, in full knowledge of the potential hateful slippage. Therefore, we question the management of the festival as well as the culture department of the City of Geneva on this choice and on the message that it wishes to convey to the general public by normalizing a radical ideological positioning.

In the name of the Israel-Palestine collective and the human element in all of this? (IPH): Sophie Savoie, Barbara Vogt-Hornick, Michel Borzykowski

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