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Controversial Israeli film ‘The Sea’ makes its North American premiere in NYC
Israeli film director Shai Carmeli-Pollak’s latest film, “The Sea,” is about a young Palestinian boy from the West Bank who is denied a permit to visit Tel Aviv with his classmates. Longing to see the Mediterranean, he courts danger as he sets out to make the journey on his own.
The Arabic-language drama was released in Israel in July; in September, it won five Ophir Awards — Israel’s version of the Oscars — including for best picture, which means “The Sea” is also Israel’s submission into the Academy Awards for best international feature film.
And now, “The Sea” is making its North American premiere on Thursday at the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan (334 Amsterdam Ave.). The screening — which also includes a reception and a Q+A with director Carmeli-Pollak and Palestinian producer Baher Agbaria — kicks off this year’s Other Israel Film Festival, an annual event that spotlights untold stories from Israeli and Palestinian societies.
Filmed in the summer of 2023, “The Sea” is partially inspired by true events: Carmeli-Pollak visited the West Bank for the first time in the early 2000s, during the Second Intifada.
“Seeing what’s going on really influenced me,” Carmeli-Pollak, 57, said, describing how a border wall between the West Bank and Israel, begun in 2002, restricted Palestinian travel into Israel. “And I started to go more and more and more and became an activist.”
Carmeli-Pollak became an activist alongside groups like Anarchists Against the Wall, a group advocating against the concrete security wall between Israel and the West Bank. His experiences informed the 2006 documentary, “Bilin, My Love,” about a Palestinian village set for demolition by the Israeli government.
No one particular moment or event inspired “The Sea,” Carmeli-Pollak said. Rather, the director said it was the West Bank residents’ longing for the sea — something Carmeli-Pollak said he frequently heard — as well as their desperate need for employment, that informed the film. ”it was a long period that I met people, and they spoke about this,” he said.
Since its release, “The Sea” has been ensnared in political crosshairs: It was produced with financial support from the Israel Film Fund, a public fund that was described as an institution “implicated in genocide and apartheid against the Palestinian people” by a growing boycott against the Israeli film industry signed by more than 1,200 prominent Hollywood stars.
On the other end of the political spectrum, Israeli Culture and Sports Minister Miki Zohar, a Likud Party member, has called for the defunding of the Israeli Academy of Film and Television, which runs the Ophir Awards. Zohar, who has only seen “the most important parts of the movie.” claims the film portrays the Israeli military in a negative light.
“It is probably the hottest Israeli film of the year,” Isaac Zablocki, the executive director of the Other Israel Film Festival and the JCC’s senior director of film programs, said of the festival’s sold-out screening of “The Sea.”
“Since all this noise with the boycott of Israeli films — and on the other side, the Israeli government declaring its lack of support for this film specifically, and Israeli cinema in general — it’s felt even more important for us to highlight this film as much as possible and really give it as much support,” Zablocki added. “I think this movie, right now, is exactly what Israel needs.”
The New York Jewish Week spoke with Carmeli-Pollak just days before the film’s North American premiere. Keep scrolling for our conversation.
This interview has been lightly condensed and edited for clarity.
Was the idea always to tell this story from a Palestinian perspective?
The idea from the very beginning was to tell the story from the point of view of a Palestinian child. That perspective allows us to strip away the almost automatic “political” baggage that comes with an adult’s point of view.
A child’s perspective is free from all that complexity. In that sense, for me the film is not necessarily just a Palestinian story, but rather a story about two societies living on opposite sides of the wall — the Palestinian and the Israeli.
We have an opportunity to see Israeli society through the eyes of this child, and perhaps to look again at things that are usually invisible or taken for granted.
How did you find the cast and crew?
The cast is a mix of professional actors and non-actors. Naturally, the boy, Muhammad Gazawi, was not a professional actor. I met him when I visited a Thai boxing club in a Palestinian city inside Israel called Qalansawe. I met there a group of tough young athletes, and he quickly struck me as a boy with remarkable acting abilities.
You said the rough cut of the film was already completed by Oct. 7, 2023. Can you tell me more about what the cross-cultural collaboration looked like at the time?
We shot the film in the summer of 2023. Apart from the fact that the producer is Palestinian, the crew was mixed — Palestinians and Israelis.
On set you could hear both Hebrew and Arabic blending together naturally. The crew made the same journey shown in the film — moving between Palestinian villages, where we received a warm welcome and generous hospitality, and cities inside Israel. Even before Oct. 7, it wasn’t common to see a joint production like this, and it was a special experience for everyone involved. For many of the Israeli crew members, it was their first time being hosted in a Palestinian village. After the war broke out, Baher and I were deeply worried and heartbroken — first and foremost for the people we care about, but also for the film.
We thought no one would want to watch such a small story when horrific events were happening all around. And indeed, at first we faced difficulties in distributing the film. But as time went by, it seems that openness to a story like this is slowly returning, and we hope the film will reach as wide an audience as possible.
What was that partnership like in the wake of Oct. 7?
I was in contact all the time with Baher, the producer. He’s Palestinian, and we were both horrified by what’s going on — by the 7th of October, and with the reaction in Gaza, which was terrible. We were really, really worried. But we also felt like maybe nobody would want to watch the film now. I spoke to the actors, like Khalifa Natour [who plays Ribhi, Khaled’s father], who were devastated with what’s going on. But our communication was just the same — as friends, as people that are in the same circle. It’s not that now, suddenly, I’m from one side, and he is from the other side. It felt like we’re still connected.
At the end of the film, when Khaled and Ribhi are being arrested by the police, there’s a shot where the Israelis at the café kind of pause for a moment; they look shocked or horrified, and then they go back to their coffee. What were you trying to say about Israeli society and their attitudes toward police or military violence against Palestinians?
I tried to make this film not just to speak about Israeli society, but about human beings, to make it more universal in a way. I was really, really inspired by “Bicycle Thieves,” the Italian film by Vittorio De Sica from the 1940s. It tells the story of a father and son, also. And I was so emotional by this film, 80 years after it was made. I felt that I wanted to make a film that people can watch years from now, and still get the story.
So the idea was about human beings and the way that people are behaving, of course, in political arrangements, because everything is politics. I don’t think people in other countries would behave differently in this kind of system that exists here.
People just live their lives. They sit in a café, they see this scene, and then, like the viewers in the cinema, they go back to their lives after they sit.
In a way, I think generally, what I was trying to say is that people are not evil. They’re not looking to hurt other people, but because the system is very, very corrupt and discriminative and injustice unjustified, this is what caused all the problems.
The Israeli Culture Ministry, led by Miki Zohar, wants to defund the Ophir Awards, which had granted you many awards for this film. Is there any update on that?
He did establish his own competition and to offer a lot of money for each prize. So he is using public money for his agenda, which is not surprising. This is the way this populist fascist government is working. And besides this, I don’t know anything new.
I would prefer to live in a place where the minister of culture supports films and supports the freedom of speech and doesn’t try to block it. But when the situation is like this, at least, he saved me from — now that the film goes out to the world — having to explain that I’m not representing this government.
What do you hope that New York viewers — especially Jewish viewers who may be unfamiliar with Palestinian life in the West Bank, or their interactions with Israelis — will get out of your film?
I don’t know if I’m telling something new to people, but maybe so. I guess liberals know there is discrimination against people that live under the occupation. But it’s not an article; it’s different when you read about it and when you experience it more in a more emotional way.
So maybe the idea is that the film can give you another aspect of this — to actually have some feelings about the story of this kid, and to maybe open these channels of understanding, and know that what’s going on here can’t go on like it used to be before. We can’t go back to the same point as before the war. There should be a deep change, and we need the support from the outside for this change. That’s for sure. There are a lot of forces inside Israel and forces in the United States that are against these kinds of changes.
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How a law used to protect synagogues is now being deployed against ICE protesters and journalists
After a pro-Palestinian protest at a New Jersey synagogue turned violent in October, the Trump administration took an unusual step — using a federal law typically aimed at protecting abortion clinics to sue the demonstrators.
Now, federal authorities are attempting to deploy the same law against journalists as well as protesters against Immigration and Customs Enforcement amid the agency’s at times violent crackdown in Minneapolis.
Former CNN anchor Don Lemon, a local journalist, and two protesters were arrested after attending a Jan. 18 anti-ICE protest at a church in St. Paul, Minnesota, Justice Department officials said Friday. Protesters alleged the pastor at Cities Church worked for ICE.
The federal law they are accused of violating, the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, or FACE, prohibits the use of force or intimidation to interfere with reproductive health care clinics and houses of worship.
But in the three decades since its passage in 1994, the law had almost entirely been deployed against anti-abortion protesters causing disruptions at clinics.
That changed in September of last year, when the Trump administration cited the FACE Act to sue pro-Palestinian demonstrators at Congregation Ohr Torah in West Orange, New Jersey.
It was the first time the Department of Justice had used the law against demonstrators outside a house of worship, Harmeet Dhillon, an assistant attorney general for the department’s civil rights division, said at the time.
The novel legal strategy — initially advanced by Jewish advocacy groups to fight antisemitism — is now front and center in what First Amendment advocates are describing as an attack on freedom of the press.
“I intend to identify and find every single person in that mob that interrupted that church service in that house of God and bring them to justice,” Dhillon told Newsmax last week. “And that includes so-called ‘journalists.’”
How the law has been used
The FACE Act has traditionally been used to prosecute protesters who interfere with patients entering abortion clinics. Conservative activists have long criticized the law as violating demonstrators’ First Amendment rights, and the Trump administration even issued a memo earlier this month saying the Justice Department should limit enforcement of the law.
But in September, the Trump administration applied the FACE Act in a new way: suing the New Jersey protesters at Congregation Ohr Torah.
They had disrupted an event at the Orthodox shul that promoted real estate sales in Israel and the West Bank, blowing plastic horns in people’s ears and chanting “globalize the intifada,” a complaint alleges.
Two pro-Israel demonstrators were charged by local law enforcement with aggravated assault, including a local dentist, Moshe Glick, who police said bashed a protester in the head with a metal flashlight, sending him to the hospital. Glick said he had acted in self defense, protecting a fellow congregant who had been tackled by a protester.
The event soon became a national flashpoint, with Glick’s lawyer alleging the prosecution had been “an attempt to criminalize Jewish self-defense.” Former New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy pardoned Glick earlier this month.
The Trump administration sued the pro-Palestinian protesters under the FACE Act, seeking to ban them from protesting outside houses of worship and asking that they each pay thousands of dollars in fines.
At the time, Nathan Diament, executive director of the Orthodox Union Advocacy Center, told JNS he applauded the Trump administration “for bringing this suit to protect the Jewish community and all people of faith, who have the constitutional right to worship without fear of harassment.”
Diament did not respond to the Forward’s email asking whether he supported the use of the FACE Act against the Minneapolis journalists and protesters.
Mark Goldfeder, CEO of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, a pro-Israel group that says it uses legal tools to counter antisemitism, did not express concern over the use of the FACE Act in the Minnesota arrests — and emphasized the necessity of protecting religious spaces from interference.
“The idea that ‘you can worship’ means nothing if a mob can make it unsafe or impossible,” Goldfeder wrote in a statement to the Forward. “So if you apply it consistently: to protect a church in Minnesota, a synagogue in New Jersey, a mosque in Detroit, what you are actually protecting is pluralism itself.”
Goldfeder has also attempted to use the FACE Act against protesters at a synagogue, citing the law in a July 2024 complaint against demonstrators who had converged on an event promoting Israel real estate at Adas Torah synagogue in Los Angeles. That clash descended into violence.
The Trump administration Justice Department subsequently filed a statement of interest supporting that case, arguing that what constituted “physical obstruction” at a house of worship under the FACE Act could be interpreted broadly.
Now, similar legal reasoning may apply to journalists covering the Sunday church protest in Minneapolis. Press freedom groups have expressed deep alarm over the arrests, arguing that the journalists were there to document, not disrupt.
The arrests are “the latest example of the administration coming up with far-fetched ‘gotcha’ legal theories to send a message to journalists to tread cautiously,” said Seth Stern, chief of advocacy for Freedom of the Press Foundation. “Because the government is looking for any way to target them.”
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Nearly 90% of Turkish Opinion Columns Favor Hamas, Study Shows
Pro-Hamas demonstrators in Istanbul, Turkey, carry a banner calling for Israel’s elimination. Photo: Reuters/Dilara Senkaya
About 90 percent of opinion articles published in two of Turkey’s leading media outlets portray the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in a positive or neutral light, according to a new study, reflecting Ankara’s increasingly hostile stance toward Israel.
Earlier this week, the Israel-based Jewish People Policy Institute released a report examining roughly 15,000 opinion columns in the widely read Turkish newspapers Sabah and Hürriyet, revealing that Hamas is often depicted positively through a “resistance movement” narrative portraying its members as “martyrs.”
For example, Turkish journalist Abdulkadir Selvi, writing in Hürriyet, described the assassinated Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh as “a holy martyr not only of Palestine but of Islam as a whole” who “fought for peace,” while portraying Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “the new Hitler.”
JPPI also found that most articles in these two newspapers took a neutral stance on the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, offering almost no clear condemnation of the attacks and failing to acknowledge the group’s targeting of civilians.
Some journalists even went so far as to praise the violence as serving the Palestinian cause, the study noted.
In one striking example, Hürriyet published an article just one day after the attack, lauding the “resistance fighters” who carried out a “mythic” assault on the “Zionist occupying regime” and celebrating the killings.
In other cases, some journalists went as far as to portray Hamas as treating the Israeli hostages it kidnapped “kindly,” denying that the terrorist group had tortured and sexually abused former captives despite clear evidence.
“There was not the slightest indication that the Israelis released by the Palestinian resistance had been tortured,” Turkish journalist Hilal Kaplan wrote in Sabah, denying claims that the hostages had suffered brutal abuse.
“They all looked exactly the same physically as they did on Oct. 6, 2023, more than a year later,” he continued.
Prof. Yedidia Stern, president of JPPI, described the study’s findings as “deeply troubling,” urging Israeli officials not to overlook the Turkish media’s positive portrayal of Hamas and denial of its abuses.
“We must not normalize incitement and antisemitism anywhere in the world – certainly not when it comes from countries with which Israel maintains diplomatic relations,” Stern said in a statement.
According to the study, nearly half of the columns expressed a positive view of Hamas, while approximately 40 percent took a neutral position.
The analysis also found that around 40 percent of opinion columns mentioning Jews or Judaism contained antisemitic elements, with some invoking “Jewish capital” to suggest global power, while others compared Zionism to Nazism or depicted Jews as immune from international criticism.
For instance, two weeks after the Oct. 7 atrocities, Turkish journalist Nedim Şener wrote in Hürriyet that global Jewish capital and control over media and international institutions had brought the United States and Europe “to their knees,” allowing Israel to carry out a “genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.”
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ADL appoints former head of embattled Gaza aid foundation to its board
The Anti-Defamation League named Rev. Johnnie Moore, who led the controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, to its board of directors last week.
Moore became the public face of the foundation over the summer as it faced blame for hundreds of Palestinian civilians being killed while attempting to access aid at distribution centers that critics said were risky and inefficient.
But the ADL described the foundation, which was created with support from the U.S. and Israeli governments, as a “historic effort to provide nearly 200 million meals for free to the people of Gaza,” in a press release.
The ADL’s leadership has become more protective of Israel in recent years as it has shifted away from its historic work on civil rights issues unrelated to antisemitism. That change included a 2017 reworking of its governance structure, which had been run by a committee of several hundred lay leaders, to a more traditional nonprofit board.
The United Nations reported in August that 859 Palestinians had been killed near the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation sites, mostly by the Israeli military. Doctors Without Borders said that the centers had “morphed into a laboratory of cruelty” with children being shot and civilians crushed in stampedes.
Moore’s role involved defending the organization. He blamed Hamas and the United Nations for causing mass starvation in Gaza and presented the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation as the best means of distributing food to civilians without allowing it to be diverted to militants.
“Hamas has been trying to use the aid situation to advance their ceasefire position,” Moore said during a July presentation to the American Jewish Congress.
The foundation shut down in December.
An evangelical leader and former campaign adviser to President Donald Trump’s with no background in international aid prior to his work with the foundation in Gaza, Moore brings a Christian perspective to the ADL’s board at a time when evangelicals are increasingly divided over Israel and antisemitism. “As a Christian, I consider it a responsibility to stand alongside ADL in this critical moment for the Jewish community and for our nation,” he said in the statement announcing his appointment.
He was appointed alongside Stacie Hartman, an attorney and lay leader based in Chicago, and Matthew Segal, a media entrepreneur who former President Joe Biden named to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council. They join a mix of philanthropists and business leaders, including Jonathan Neman, the CEO of salad chain Sweetgreen, and Max Neuberger, the publisher of Jewish Insider.
The post ADL appoints former head of embattled Gaza aid foundation to its board appeared first on The Forward.