LOS ANGELES: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences apologized Friday for failing to defend an Oscar-winning Palestinian filmmaker who said he was attacked by Israeli settlers.
The group, which hosts and awards the Oscars each year, wrote to members after movie stars including Joaquin Phoenix, Penelope Cruz and Richard Gere had slammed its initially muted response to the incident.
The Academy “condemns violence of this kind anywhere in the world” and its leaders “abhor the suppression of free speech under any circumstances,” said the letter, seen by AFP.
Hamdan Ballal co-directed “No Other Land,” which won best documentary at this year’s Academy Awards.
This week, he said he had been assaulted by settlers and detained at gunpoint by soldiers in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
Unlike multiple other prominent filmmaker groups, the US-based Academy initially did not issue a statement.
On Wednesday, it sent a letter to members that condemned “harming or suppressing artists for their work or their viewpoints,” without naming Ballal.
By Friday morning, more than 600 Academy members had signed their own statement in response.
“It is indefensible for an organization to recognize a film with an award in the first week of March, and then fail to defend its filmmakers just a few weeks later,” the members said.
“We stand in condemnation of the brutal assault and unlawful detention of Oscar-winning Palestinian filmmaker Hamdan Ballal by settlers and Israeli forces in the West Bank,” they wrote.
The Academy leadership’s response “fell far short of the sentiments this moment calls for,” said the members.
The Los Angeles-based group’s board convened an extraordinary meeting Friday to confront the deepening crisis, according to trade outlet Deadline.
Later Friday, it issued an apology to Ballal “and all artists who felt unsupported by our previous statement.”
“We regret that we failed to directly acknowledge Mr. Ballal and the film by name,” it wrote.
“No Other Land” chronicles the forced displacement of Palestinians by Israeli troops and settlers in Masafer Yatta — an area Israel declared a restricted military zone in the 1980s.
Despite winning the coveted Oscar, the film has struggled to find a major US distributor.
Following Monday’s incident, Ballal told AFP the “brutality” of the attack “made me feel it was because I won the Oscar.”
During his detention at an Israeli military center, Ballal said he noticed soldiers mentioning his name alongside the word “Oscar” during shift changes.
He was released Tuesday, after being detained the previous day for allegedly “hurling rocks.”
Yuval Abraham, who also co-directed and appears in the documentary, has spoken out against the Academy’s response.
“After our criticism, the academy’s leaders sent out this email to members explaining their silence on Hamdan’s assault: they need to respect ‘unique viewpoints’,” he wrote on X, sharing a screenshot of the Academy’s letter.