As Locarno’s 8,000-strong Piazza Grande audience welcomed Bollywood megastar Shah Rukh Khan on stage Saturday evening, a much smaller crowd congregated across the way for an alternative film event.
Organized by local left-wing cooperative Coordinamento Unico a sostegno della Palestina/ Coordination in support of Palestine (Cusp), a group of local activists and out-of-towners, mostly Locarno festival delegates, huddled around a pop-up projector for an evening of film screenings about Palestine.
The pop-up event was hosted on a piece of green next to the Teatro di Locarno, the festival’s venue for press screenings, a few meters back from the large Piazza Grande screen. The event began with a book drive where literature on Palestinian history and merch like keffiyeh scarves were sold. The demo proved controversial with many unaffiliated people passing by the event and stopping to voice their displeasure.
“Return the hostages and we’ll stop the bombs,” one counter-demonstrator, who was also a Locarno Film Festival delegate, said to the crowd. As the crowd grew the organizers screened a series of Palestinian-shot shorts followed by American journalist Abby Martin’s feature documentary Gaza Fights for Freedom (2019).
The event was not held in collaboration with the festival but organizers have said they plan to hold a second evening of screenings on August 16, the penultimate night of the festival. The headline film that night will be Erin Axelman and Sam Eilertsen’s doc Israelism, which just landed U.S. distribution via Watermelon Pictures. The controversial documentary follows two young American Jews who travel to Israel to gain a greater understanding of the country’s history and the role it has played in their own identities.
The Locarno Film Festival runs until August 17.
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