‘Sounds like censorship to me.’ O cinema co-founder slams proposed eviction over film

O Cinema South Beach, an independent, non-profit movie theater, has been showing sold-out screenings of the controversial, Oscar-winning film No Other Land. But the Miami Beach’s mayor calls the documentary “anti-semitic” and is now trying to cut off the city’s funding and lease to the cinema, which is operating on city property.

“The threats of closing a cinema down because some people do not like the films we show certainly sounds like censorship to me,” O Cinema’s co-founder and board of directors chair Kareem Tabsch told NPR. “We’ve always shown films that have sparked real strong sentiments and real strong opinions…. Throughout the years, we’ve certainly had vocal audience members or community members who’ve questioned some programming choices… But what we have never encountered is elected officials trying to dictate what we should and should not be showing. That’s certainly a first.”

No Other Land won this year’s Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. It was made by Palestinian activist Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham and their team. From 2019 to 2023, they chronicled ongoing bulldozing of homes and buildings in the Masafer Yatta community on the West Bank. Their film focuses on Adra and his family and neighbors, whose ancestral homeland was taken over by Israeli forces to become a closed military training zone. Some of the Palestinian families resisted displacement, living in caves and continually trying to rebuild.

No Other Land was lauded by critics, but it has come under fire. The Israeli culture and sports minister called for a boycott of the film, and a pro-Palestinian activist organization criticized it for “normalizing” the Israeli occupation.

The film still has no U.S. distributor, leaving the filmmakers to make one-on-one deals with cinemas. Art house theaters such as O Cinema have been screening the film independently.

“A one-sided propaganda attack”

On March 5, Miami Beach Mayor Steven Meiner sent a strongly worded letter to O Cinema asking that it cancel planned screenings of the No Other Land. He noted that his city “has one of the largest concentrations of Jewish residents in the U.S.”

In the letter, first published in The Miami Herald and confirmed by O Cinema, Meiner criticized the film as “a one-sided propaganda attack on the Jewish people.”

“Here in Miami Beach, our City has adopted a strong policy of support for the State of Israel in its struggle to defend itself and its residents against attacks by the terrorist organizations Hamas and Hezbollah,” the letter says. “Airing performances of the one-sided, inaccurate film “No Other Land” at a movie theater facility owned by the City and operated by O Cinema is disappointing.

Meiner is now proposing that Miami Beach terminate its lease to O Cinema and withhold the remainder of its nearly $80,000 grant money to the theater. The Miami Beach City Commission will vote on the resolution next Wednesday.

Meiner has not responded to NPR’s requests for comment.

Despite pressure from the mayor, O Cinema has been showing No Other Land at its single screen theater in the city’s old City Hall. (The theater closed for renovations on Wednesday for a week, but plans to reopen the same day as the council vote.)

Tabsch notes audience members specifically asked the theater to show No Other Land, and he says every screening at O Cinema has been sold out and there have been no protests.

In a statement to NPR, O Cinema’s CEO Vivian Marthell said that initially, she had agreed to the mayor’s request to stop screening the film, but then she reconsidered.

“My initial reaction to Mayor Meiner’s threats was made under duress. After reflecting on the broader implications for free speech and O Cinema’s mission, I (along with the O Cinema board and staff members) agreed it was critical to screen this acclaimed film,” she wrote.

Marthell spoke directly to movie-goers before each screening, giving a version of the written statement she sent to NPR:

“We understand the power of cinema to tell stories that matter and we recognize that some stories—especially those rooted in real-world conflicts—can evoke strong feelings and passionate reactions. As they should. Our decision to screen No Other Land is not a declaration of political alignment. It is a bold reaffirmation of our fundamental belief that every voice deserves to be heard,” she wrote.

For years, O Cinema has hosted the Miami Jewish Film Festival, which includes a series of films about the Holocaust. The possibility of losing Miami Beach’s only art house cinema is disturbing to Tabsch, a filmmaker whose 2018 documentary The Last Resort, was about Miami Beach’s Jewish community in the 1970s.

“We have never been in this predicament before. It is really, really unfortunate. It’s really, really alarming,” says Tabsch. “I obviously am deeply concerned for O Cinema as an organization and its future in Miami Beach. The fiscal detriment that will come to it from losing funding and its place of operation are significant … But I’m equally concerned as a member of this community and as a filmmaker myself, because when you start dictating what folks should be seeing and should not be seeing, we look less and less like a free and democratic society and more and more like an authoritarian regime in Miami Beach.”