Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid, head of the jury of the international competition section at the recently concluded International Film Festival of India (IFFI) in Goa, stirred a hornet’s nest when he criticised Vivek Agnihotri’s The Kashmir Files at the IFFI and called it a vulgar propaganda film. The IFFI concluded on November 28. Nadav Lapid later said, he stood by everything he had said about the film because “in countries that are increasingly losing the ability to speak the truth, someone needs to speak up”. He clarified that his comments, however, did not “express one position or another on the conflict in Kashmir”. He elaborated that he “knows how to recognise propaganda disguised as a movie”. He added that while it was not a crime to make bad films, what Vivek Agnihotri had directed was “crude, manipulative and violent”.
Lapid added that if a similar situation might happen in Israel, “I would be happy that in such a situation, the head of a foreign jury would be willing to say things as he sees them”.
In an interview to an Israeli newspaper, Lapid later said, he was not surprised by the outrage over his comments. “Since this is a film that the Indian government encourages, I assume that the government there is not happy about it. But is a country only about its government? I assume not. What I said is not comfortable for the government of India, nor for the government in the making in Israel, which the ambassador there represents.”
Later, Lapid apologised to people who had suffered during the Kashmir exodus and who might have felt hurt by his comments on the film, but maintained that his remarks were limited to the quality of the film. At the same time, he reiterated that The Kashmir Files was “a vulgar propaganda movie that didn’t have a place and was inappropriate for such a prestigious competitive section”. Why, he even told an Indian news channel that he could repeat his views on the film again and again.