The projectors kept rolling at the New York Film Festival, despite pressure from film workers and fans upset over the festival’s financial links to Israel. The festival, which took place from Sept. 27th to Oct.10th, occurred during the anniversary of the Israel-Hamas war, and is the latest in an international trend of cultural boycotts since the conflict began. 

Over 200 NYFF workers and filmmakers signed an open letter urging NYFF’s board and leadership to call for a ceasefire. Some filmmakers and activists are upset that the NYFF is partnered with Bloomberg Philanthropies, which in 2022 launched a program to strengthen leadership in Israel, training mayors and city officials from over 40 West Bank settlements. At the NYFF, director Neo Sora called out Bloomberg Philanthropies while presenting his film “Happened,” about supporting displacement, and protestors disrupted Pedro Almodóvar’s discussion of “The Room Next Door,” a movie about two writers reconnecting, to which he responded by giving the activists a minute to speak. Additional pressure came from the festival’s host, Film at Lincoln Center, which has many donors and corporate funders with direct financial ties to Israel.

A New York Counter Film Festival is being held in opposition to the traditional festival, featuring films withdrawn from other film festivals this year, Palestinian programming, and educational workshops. 

Edward Frumkin, a freelance film critic, said he could tell certain NYFF staff were avoiding speaking about Palestine, whereas other seasonal staff could be seen wearing Palestinian pins. Frumkin pulled out from nearly all of his film coverage of the festival in solidarity with the counter festival. He kept two scheduled interviews to “amplify institutional accountability and complicity.” 

“I wanted to be very conscious of … what type of review or interview [I would do], and how I could amplify the criticism of Lincoln Center,” Frumkin said. 

The counter festival was started by a group of city filmmakers and cultural workers who have been involved in direct action of cultural institutions they deem “complicit in Zionism.” The group reached out to filmmakers who they hoped would drop out of the festival, and to Lincoln Center directly to address their demands, which include divestment and to cease the policing of demonstrations at Lincoln Center.  

While the counter festival did not succeed at getting any films to withdraw from the primary festival, the organizers said they succeeded by raising money for families in Gaza and by debuting Rosalind Nashashibi’s film “The Invisible Worm,” three days before NYFF’s viewing–an act of protest made possible by the the filmmaker, who is Palestinian.

A Palestinian-Israeli collective of four directors was featured at NYFF with their film “No Other Land.” Filmed between 2019 and 2023, the film exposes the damage done to Masafer Yatta, a group of Palestinian settlements in the southern West Bank at the hands of the Israeli military. During the week the documentary was screened, one of the film’s directors, Basel Adra, posted that his home was invaded in the West Bank and that his father was kidnapped, blindfolded, and held at a settlement outpost by Israeli soldiers.

The open letter signed by NYFF filmmakers and workers, cited Adra’s suffering to highlight the false balance between the festival and its donors. “As filmmakers and cultural workers, our creative expression should not be used to launder war crimes,” especially when many of the films deal with state violence, such as “No Other Land,” as well as “Dahomey,” “April,” and ‘Blitz.” 

Other critics expressed a deeper resentment with Lincoln Center over its construction by Robert Moses in the 1950s, which resulted in the demolition of the predominantly Puerto Rican and Black San Juan Hill neighborhood. A new documentary on the subject, “San Juan Hill: Manhattan’s Lost Neighborhood” by Stanley Nelson, premiered at NYFF and faced criticism from some who draw a parallel between the forced displacement of San Juan Hill residents and those in Gaza. 

The counter festival was inspired by other festival boycotts in the last year, such as the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam, in which filmmakers withdrew 20 films after the festival was pressured to put out a statement regarding a banner with the slogan “From the river to sea, Palestine will be free” that had been featured in a demonstration during the festival’s opening ceremony. “That slogan does not represent us, and we do not endorse it in any way,” the IDFA statement read, which filmmakers who support Palestine found unsatisfactory. The statement failed to acknowledge that the phrase was ruled protected speech and not anti-semitic in the Netherlands, where IDFA is held. 

 At SXSW, 80 musicians pulled out after the discovery that defense contractors, such as Raytheon subsidiaries, and the U.S. Army were sponsors for the event, resulting in SXSW dropping those sponsors for 2025.

Some boycotts have grown into movements. Strike Germany calls on international cultural workers to strike from German cultural institutions that they feel suppress freedom of expression. Two filmmakers pulled out of the Berlinale festival in February, citing solidarity with Strike Germany.