Guy Davidi, the Israeli co-director of Oscar-nominated documentary "5 Broken Cameras" joined HuffPost Live Thursday to speak out against claims that he and his Palestinian co-director Emad Burnat should be charged with slander because their film was critical of the Israeli occupation.
Israeli nonprofit Consensus has petitioned the Attorney General claiming that Davidi and Burnat — whose film traces the story of Burnat and his village's nonviolent response as Israel's settlements expanded into Palestinian territories in the occupied West Bank — should be charged with slander and prosecuted for "incitement."
"The media in Israel is quite nourishing this story and supporting it," Davidi told HuffPost Live host Ahmed Shihab-Eldin Thursday. "Obviously Israeli audiences are supporting this kind of lawsuit that will probably limit filmmakers in the future to create films that criticize the Israeli occupation."
Israel's outgoing Culture and Sports Minister Limor Livnat encouraged Israeli filmmakers to practice "self-censorship" and noted that she "wasn't sorry" that "5 Broken Cameras" didn't win the Best Documentary Feature Academy Award earlier this year, prompting a critical Haaretz editorial titled, "The censorship minister."
"The film shows a lot of violations of human rights laws and a lot of violations that Israelis were not prepared to see," Davidi added, noting that the film was shown on Israel's major broadcaster. "Suddenly every Israeli could watch Israeli soldiers shooting, without any excuse, unarmed Palestinian demonstrators. So it created a lot of rage in Israeli communities."
Davidi was critical of the Israeli media for focusing on the controversy around the film rather than the film's message.
"No media, no channel, no program actually dealt with what the film is showing," he told HuffPost Live. "They shift the discussion not to deal with what the film is showing but to deal with what we did to the Israeli image, or to the Israeli soldiers' image and the military image. And that's disturbing for me."
Davidi previously joined HuffPost Live to push back against Israel's claims that his movie was an "Israeli film," saying that the government was trying to use him "to show the good face of Israel."