"We're not protesting the Israeli films or the filmmakers," Canadian filmmaker John Greyson said.
"Our target is TIFF's Spotlight on Tel Aviv itself, and specifically its connections to the 'Brand Israel' campaign and the Israeli Consulate, which make the spotlight look and feel like a propaganda exercise."
The TIFF chose this year to present 10 films on Israel by local filmmakers for its "City to City" program, which each year focuses its lens on a different city.
But filmmakers termed the move as tantamount to “staging a propaganda campaign” on Israel's behalf.
More than 50 well-know actors and filmmakers signed a declaration condemning the Festival's complicity with the Israeli propaganda.
"This program ignores the suffering of thousands of former residents and descendants of the Tel Aviv/Jaffa area who currently live in refugee camps in the Occupied Territories or who have been dispersed to other countries," say the declaration, whose signatories include actors Jane Fonda and Danny Glover, author Naomi Klein, and filmmaker Ken Loach.
"Looking at modern, sophisticated Tel Aviv without also considering the city's past and the realities of Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza strip, would be like rhapsodizing about the beauty and elegant lifestyles in white-only Cape Town or Johannesburg during apartheid without acknowledging the corresponding black townships of Khayelitsha and Soweto."
Founded in 1976, the TIFF is now among the top prestigious film festivals in the world.
This year's festival, which will open on September 10, showcases more than 300 films from 64 countries.
This is not the first time filmmakers protest at Israeli practices in the occupied Palestinian lands.
Last July, British director Ken Loach, an outspoken opponent of Israel's policies, withdrew from the Melbourne's International Film Festival (MIFF) in protest at Israel's funding of the protest.
Greyson has withdrawn his documentary "Covered" from the festival in protest at Israel's deadly practices in the occupied Palestinian lands.
"Our action doesn't 'censor',” Greyson said in an e-mail to the Times.
“It shines a spotlight on the Israeli occupation."
Greyson was responding to claims by TIFF co-director Cameron Bailey that the criticism was a bid to censor the filmmakers' opinion.
"John [Greyson] writes that his protest isn't against the films or filmmakers we have chosen, but against the spotlight itself," he said.
"By that reasoning, no films programmed within this series would have met his approval, no matter what they contained."
Greyson said the filmmakers' move is an effort to get the voice of thousands of suffering Palestinians heard.
"As filmmaker Ken Loach eloquently wrote this week in The Guardian, the boycott movement against Israel isn't censorship," he said.
"It's a legitimate call from Palestinian civil society, asking for non-violent pressure to be brought to bear on Israel to end its human rights abuses. That's what we're doing.”
Source: Islam Online