Your decision to cancel the screening of a documentary on the Hamas atrocities of October 7, 2023, citing “copyright concerns” because the filmmakers did not obtain permission from the terrorists themselves whose GoPro footage documented the massacres, is a moral collapse.
Let’s be perfectly clear: Hamas filmed its own war crimes. These were not staged “productions” deserving of artistic royalties. They were gleeful, self-incriminating records of the slaughter of innocent human beings — Israeli men, women, children, elderly, even infants — butchered, burned, abducted. That footage is not “property” in the moral sense; it is evidence. Evidence of war crimes was verified by Human Rights Watch on October 18, 2023 (link here: https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/10/18/israel/palestine-videos-hamas-led-attacks-verified).
By framing your decision as a matter of intellectual property law, you have crossed from neutrality into complicity. You have effectively placed the “ownership rights” of murderers above the world’s right — the world’s obligation — to bear witness to truth.
You are the Toronto International Film Festival. You are meant to be a stage for the human story, especially when it is searing, urgent, and inconvenient. What is film for, if not to confront reality and demand moral reckoning? What have you become if the killers’ claims to “copyright” can silence the victims’ testimonies?
October 7 survivors have already shared their experiences through the USC Shoah Foundation’s October 7 Testimonies (https://sfi.usc.edu/october7testimonies). These are not simply “stories” — they are cries for justice, preserved so no one can say “we didn’t know.” Yet your decision tells survivors their pain is less important than the imagined “rights” of those who tried to erase them.
TIFF, the world is watching. This is not about copyright. This is about courage. Do you stand for art as a force for truth and human dignity — or for bureaucracy as a shield for cowardice?
You have a chance to reverse this decision. You have a chance to be remembered for defending the moral conscience of art, not for bowing to the perpetrators of mass slaughter.
Restore the screening. Stand with survivors. Show the truth.
