News from Jordan and the Ayni Aynak film festival. Unfortunately it is not good.Last week an email was sent out by a Jordanian filmmaker saying that Ayni Aynak and eye-to-I are Israeli organizations and serving the normalization (normalization means: the normalization of the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians before the occupation is ended). He called for Boycott.
Here in Jordan this is a very sensitive issue. Even though the king has a peace agreement with Israel, cultural organizations are trying not to have any contact with Israeli organizations.
The filmmaker isn’t right about us being Israeli. What he found on the eye-to-I website was a former project that happened in 2007 in cooperation with the Kibuzz Harduf in Israel (the "Walk your Talk" conference) Even though eye-to-I took a clear stand against normalization and proved that we are not an Israeli organization the filmmaker continued to threaten us.
As a result our 2 partners in Jordan pulled out of the Ayni Aynak film festival (we found out that the filmmaker arranged several boycotts against projects that one of our partners was doing as the organization that he works with is not friendly with it). Both partner organizations fear to be related in any way to an Israeli project. They would still love to do the project but not now and not with eye-to-I.
For Amna, Alexia and me as the organizers it is a tough time right now. On the one hand we seem to be the victim of an internal dispute between competing film organizations, and on the other hand, the fact that eye-to-I once had a project with Israel is a fundamental problem here.
All of this happened at a stage of the project where posters were printed, participants started to apply, and we finalized arrangements with people from the Jordanian film industry. Now we are trying to find out if we can do the Ayni Aynak film week without eye-to-I and with other partners in the near future.
We will inform you as soon as we have more news.
Best greetings,
Annie
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