An Australian documentary on how antisemitic cancel culture post-Oct. 7 has manifested itself in the world of art has itself been “canceled,” with the country’s major film festivals and its two public broadcasters refusing to screen the film, the documentary’s producer and director said on Sunday.
The film ‘Cancelled,’ which portrays the doxing of Jewish artists in Australia following the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel three years ago, will premiere at the Jewish International Film Festival in Australia in September after the high-profile Sydney and Melbourne film festivals both rejected the movie.
“The fact that the film itself has ironically gotten canceled vindicates the whole film in the form of a Greek tragedy,” the documentary’s filmmaker, Danny Ben-Moshe, told JNS. “At first I found it massively disappointing, but then I found it affirmative in that it proved the whole thesis of the film and left no room for doubt.”
The 88-minute documentary, which includes prominent Australian Jewish artists, was also nixed by both Australia’s national public broadcaster, ABC, and the country’s multicultural network SBS, both of which are taxpayer-funded. It will instead air on News24 Australia, formerly Sky News Australia, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.
“I was living in that art world until Israel was the victim on October 7, and you are never supposed to stand up for Israel,” said Nina Sanadze, an Australian artist who appears in the film and was one of 600 publicly doxed Jewish creators after Oct. 7.
Ben-Moshe said that he had made the film over the last two years for a non-Jewish audience, since the subject was all too well known to the Jewish community. Jewish leaders have condemned the Australian government for allowing a climate of incitement to violence following the Oct. 7 attacks to run unchecked, leading to a series of hate-based assaults that culminated in last year’s Bondi Beach massacre, the worst terrorist attack in the country’s history.
“This brings clarity to where we stand, and we don’t stand in a good place,” Ben-Moshe said.
He said that the fact that the country’s cultural gatekeepers and elite institutions did not find it appropriate to screen such a film even after a months-long just -concluded state inquiry on antisemitism speaks volumes for the future, and is much more concerning than the average hate-monger.
“Antisemitism is not just about hating Jews but about the inability to empathize with Jews because we are an inconvenient truth that challenges the zeitgeist narrative that they subscribe to,” he said.
About 110,000 Jews live in Australia, primarily in Melbourne and Sydney.
“The only conclusion I can reach is that the future of Australian Jews looks bleak,” Ben-Moshe said.
