- Hamdan Ballal was attacked by settlers and detained at gunpoint by soldiers in the Israeli-occupied West Bank this week.
- “There is no other land” is a chronicle of the forced displacement of Palestinians by Israeli troops and settlers in Masafer Yatta in the West Bank.
LOS ANGELES: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences apologized Friday for failing to protect an Oscar-winning Palestinian director who said he was attacked by Israeli settlers.
The association, which hosts and presents the annual Oscars, wrote to its members after movie stars including Joaquin Phoenix, Penelope Cruz and Richard Gere criticised its initial muted response to the incident.
The academy “condemns violence of this kind anywhere in the world” and its leaders “do not accept the suppression of free speech under any circumstances,” the letter, seen by AFP, said.
Hamdan Ballal co-directed the film No Other Land, which won this year's Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.
This week, he said he was attacked by settlers and detained at gunpoint by soldiers in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
Unlike many other prominent film groups, the US-based Academy did not initially issue a statement.
On Wednesday, the group sent a letter to members condemning “harming or suppressing artists for their work or their views,” without naming Ballal.
By Friday morning, more than 600 Academy members had signed their own statement in response.
“It is inexcusable for an organization to honor a film with an award in the first week of March and then fail to protect its creators just weeks later,” the organization said.
“We condemn the brutal attack and illegal detention of Oscar-winning Palestinian filmmaker Hamdan Ballal by settlers and Israeli forces in the West Bank,” they wrote.
According to Academy members, the leadership's reaction was “far from in keeping with the feelings that this moment requires.”
The Los Angeles-based group's board of directors called an emergency meeting on Friday to confront the deepening crisis, according to trade publication Deadline.
Later on Friday, the company apologized to Ballal “and all artists who felt they were not supported by our previous statement.”
“We regret that we did not directly mention Mr. Ballal's name and the title of the film,” the statement said.
The film No Other Land depicts the forced displacement of Palestinians by Israeli troops and settlers in Masafer Yatta, an area that Israel declared a closed military zone in the 1980s.
Despite winning the coveted Oscar, the film failed to find a major distributor in the United States.
After the incident on Monday, Ballal told AFP that the “brutality” of the attack “made me feel like it happened because I won an Oscar.”
Ballal said that while he was being held at an Israeli military center, he noticed that soldiers would mention his name next to the word “Oscar” during shift changes.
He was released on Tuesday after being detained the previous day on suspicion of “stone throwing.”
Yuval Abraham, who also co-directed and starred in the documentary, spoke out against the Academy's reaction.
“After our criticism, the academy’s leadership sent this email to members explaining their silence on Hamdan’s attack: they need to respect ‘unique perspectives,’” he wrote on X, sharing a screenshot of the academy’s email.
