Ken Loach and Jane Fonda made to ‘look foolish’ by Venice best film winner

The Toronto film festival, which opened at the end of last week, overlapping with Venice, has been hit by a censorship storm concerning its decision to choose Tel Aviv for its inaugural 'city spotlight' section. A line-up of well-known protestors - including Jane Fonda, Ken Loach and Noam Chomsky - has backed a call by a little-known Canadian documentary maker John Greyson to boycott the Tel Aviv films.

Greyson said this was "not the year" to celebrate 'Brand Israel' in the light of the invasion of Gaza and the continued expansion of illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian land. As a result, Fonda, Loach, Chomsky and others signed a joint letter titled 'The Toronto Declaration - No Celebration of Occupation'. It claimed that the festival "whether intentionally or not, has become complicit in the Israeli propaganda machine".

However, their protest has been thrown into sharp relief by the fact that an Israeli film, Lebanon (above), won Venice's Golden Lion for best film at the weekend. Moreover, it is a film that could never be called propaganda. Set almost entirely inside an Israeli tank at the start of the 1982 Lebanon War, it carries a powerful anti-war message.

Its director, Samuel Maoz, who based his script on his own traumatic experience as a tank gunner during that war, said there were powerful voices in Israel who had been opposed to his film competing at Venice. He added: "I suppose ever filmmaker has the naïve, even pathetic dream that his film could be the one that finally stops a war."

A Hollywood producer attending Toronto told The First Post last night: "The Golden Lion for Lebanon has made Fonda and co look foolish. I admire Ken Loach as a film-maker but there are a lot of people here who wish he'd stop using these events to score cheap political points."

He was referring to the fact that Loach tried to force boycotts at both the Melbourne and Edinburgh film festivals this summer. In Melbourne he withdrew his film Looking for Eric when he discovered the festival was part-sponsored by Israel. In Edinburgh he led a campaign to force festival organisers to return a £300 grant from the Israeli Embassy designed to pay for a young Tel Aviv filmmaker, Tali Shalom Ezer, to travel to Scotland for the screening of her film, Surrogate.

Prominent American and Canadian Jews had already reacted angrily to the Fonda-Loach Toronto boycott before the news of Lebanon's victory in Venice came through on Saturday night.

Marvin Hier, founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, said: "Tel Aviv is one of the freest cities in the world, warts and all: a model city of diversity, freedom of expression and tolerance, for Arabs and Jews. It is the height of hypocrisy to single out Tel Aviv."

The veteran Canadian director Ivan Reitman, who made the mega-hit Ghostbusters, said: "Film is about exploring the complexities and contradictions of the human condition. Any attempt to silence that conversation, to hijack the festival for any political agenda in the end, only serves to silence artistic voices."

Samuel Moaz, director of Lebanon, asked by the Observer to comment on the Toronto boycott, said: "The point of a film like mine is to open a dialogue, to get people talking to each other about important issues. It makes no sense to boycott art. Maybe I wouldn't have won if Jane Fonda was on the jury, but she wasn't." ·