The mayor of Miami Beach is moving to cut off funding from an independent cinema and terminate its lease after it screened an award-winning documentary about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
O Cinema, an independent community theater inside Old City Hall in South Beach, became embroiled in a dispute with Miami Beach Mayor Steven Meiner after it opted to screen “No Other Land,” a documentary about Israeli military violence in the West Bank that recently won the Oscar for best documentary feature. In a newsletter to residents Tuesday, Meiner called the documentary, which was produced by Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers, a “false one-sided propaganda attack on the Jewish people.”
On Wednesday, Meiner introduced a resolution that proposes discontinuing a planned public grant to the theater and terminating its lease with 180 days’ notice. City commissioners are expected to vote on it next Wednesday.
“No Other Land,” despite its commercial success and critical acclaim, has struggled to secure a U.S. distributor — which its producers have said is because distributors fear the political backlash from screening the film since it documents the Israeli military forcefully displacing Palestinian people in Masafer Yatta, a group of hamlets in the southern West Bank, between 2019 and 2023 — with the footage concluding shortly before Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel and subsequent Israeli invasion of Gaza.
It follows the unfolding friendship between two of the film’s directors — Yuval Abraham, who is Israeli, and Basel Adra, who is Palestinian — and shows them repeatedly confronting Israeli soldiers executing what they say are legal orders to demolish Palestinian homes and evict residents in Masafer Yatta, where Adra grew up.
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Critics, including Abraham, condemned Meiner’s move as a violation of free expression.
“What No Other Land exposes about the occupation of Masafer Yatta in the West Bank is so damning that the only strategy left is censorship,” Abraham said in a statement responding to Meiner’s proposal. “It won’t work. Banning a film only makes people more determined to see it.”
After O Cinema announced its plan to screen “No Other Land,” Meiner sent CEO Vivian Marthell a letter on March 5 asking her not to air the film.
The next day, Marthell informed Meiner in a letter that although O Cinema had initially chosen the film to provide its audience “an opportunity to experience Oscar-nominated and award-season films firsthand,” she had decided to cancel the screening “due to the concerns of antisemitic rhetoric.” She pointed out that the cinema had “a long history of showcasing and supporting Jewish films” and was hosting a year-long Holocaust film series.
But then, Marthell reversed course. In a statement to The Washington Post, she said that after reflecting on the broader free-speech implications of canceling the screening, she and the O Cinema board and staff agreed it was important to go ahead. Their decision was “not a declaration of political alignment,” she said, but rather “a bold reaffirmation of our fundamental belief that every voice deserves to be heard.”
Arguing that efforts to censor artistic expression “set a dangerous precedent that threatens the creative and intellectual freedoms of all,” she called on the arts community to “stand with us” at the commission meeting next week.
Meiner, who is Jewish, in his Tuesday newsletter criticized the O Cinema for reversing course and accused it of “normalizing hate and then disseminating antisemitism” in a publicly funded facility. “For this reason, I am introducing legislation to move on from O Cinema, as permitted by our contract, and seek a cultural partner that better aligns with our community values,” he wrote.
It was not immediately clear Thursday what impact the city’s move would have on the O Cinema and its planned screenings of “No Other Land” on March 19 and 20. The resolution has not yet been adopted. It states that the city signed two recent grant agreements with O Cinema for $25,831 and $54,071.52, and that half of these sums have already been paid but the other half remains outstanding and would be canceled if the resolution passes.
In response to a request for comment, the city of Miami Beach directed The Washington Post to Meiner’s newsletter.
In an email to residents Wednesday, Commissioner Kristen Rosen Gonzalez criticized Meiner’s move but also condemned “No Other Land” as “a propaganda-driven, one-sided narrative that falsely depicts Israel as the aggressor.”
But she defended O Cinema’s choice to screen the documentary, saying that “the answer to propaganda is not censorship, it’s truth.”
Sonia Rao contributed to this report.
