By Haaretz and City Mouse – 25 Jan 2010
www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1145028.html
The Israel Film Fund has ended its financial support for director Yonatan Segal’s new piece Odem, after learning that it compares Israel’s occupation of the West Bank to the Holocaust.
Segal is best known as the star of the 1978 Israeli film Lemon Popsicle (Eskimo Lemon).
In an article published last Friday in Yedioth Ahronot, Israeli journalist Yair Lapid cited a passage from the marketing brochure for Odem, in which Segal wrote:
“It took a lot to convince the Israel Film Fund that the occupation is worse than Israel has ever admitted too and that it is possible to compare the occupation to the Holocaust.”
Lapid took issue to this comment, and criticized the fact that such a film was receiving financial support from a government body.
In the wake of Lapid’s article, the executive director of the Israel Film Fund announced that support for the film has been cut off.
Odem, which is currently being filmed, is a story that jumps in time and tells of two Palestinian women who decide to sneak into Jerusalem one night.
The Israel Film Fund pledged NIS 1.3 million for production of the film, and has already invested NIS 850,000 of that sum.
