By Seth Mandel
Monday, November 17, 2025
On November 8, the IndieChina Film Festival was scheduled
to begin in New York. IndieChina was organized by the veteran Chinese indie
figure Zhu Rikun. Mainstream Chinese cinema has exploded, but Zhu wanted to
showcase the country’s independent film industry to audiences abroad as well.
On November 6, the film festival was effectively over, two days before it was
supposed to begin.
Leading up to the festival, Zhu began getting messages
from participants saying they’d regretfully have to cancel their participation.
A few were brave enough to be honest with Zhu: They’d been threatened or
harassed by the Chinese government.
Zhu got his own form of Beijing’s “outreach” when his
father called him early in the morning, “his voice sounding strange,” according
to the New
York Times. Zhu’s father “urged him not to do anything that would hurt
China.”
Zhu was one of several film industry figures who hadn’t
lived in China in years. Non-Chinese citizens were also harassed, the Times
reported.
“I never thought about hiding this, like it was an
underground event,” Zhu told the Times. “If we were in China, I’d
probably do that.” He was genuinely surprised “that this would become so hard
even in New York.”
Borderless harassment has been a fixture of Chinese,
Russian, and Iranian influence operations in the West for a long time.
Meanwhile, China has set
filmmaking policy in Hollywood for two decades through conditional
agreements to show American movies in Chinese theaters. Now China has graduated
to deciding which film festivals can be shown in New York City.
“I hope this announcement of the cancellation of
IndieChina Film Festival will make certain unknown forces stop harassing all
the directors, guests, former staff, volunteers and my friends and family,” Zhu
said in a statement.
IndieChina was a small festival. International
Documentary Festival Amsterdam is, on the other hand, reputed to be the largest
documentary festival in the world.
IDFA is already under way. It has done nothing to unnerve
the CCP, I guess. It’s main target this year is, as with much of the
entertainment industry, the democratic State of Israel.
Late last month, Variety broke
the story that IDFA was joining the boycott-and-blacklist trend aimed at
the Jewish state. DocAviv, the main documentary film festival and organization
in Israel, gets some public funding, as is common in the industry. So DocAviv,
along with Kan and CoPro, were banned from IDFA. According to DocAviv artistic
director Michal Weits, the groups received a letter from IDFA saying “that they
are not going to provide us accreditation since we are complicit with the
genocide, which is obviously not true.”
The Israeli government has no say in what DocAviv does or
does not screen. Indeed, the dark irony in all this is that, if art is as
powerful as we are told by the pompous anti-Israel industry figures, then the
blacklists undoubtedly harm the Palestinian “cause” and do nothing to help it.
That’s not to say that there won’t be plenty of
anti-Zionist agitprop at the festival. There will be. If you’ve made a
documentary with the word Gaza in the title, as long as you’re not an Israeli
Jew you’ll get your piece shown like everybody else.
But the festival will not have Israeli projects intended
to drum up empathy for Gaza or make the case for coexistence because that would
acknowledge the fact that Israelis are people. The flat-minded artistic
activists at IDFA need Israelis to be a concept—faceless and devoid of
humanity, no matter the subject. “Culture and films are the only way to
communicate with each other,” Weits says. “But the boycott wants us to be
isolated and disappear, and yet I think our voice is important.”
But it isn’t—not to the art world, anyway. The entire
focus of anti-Zionist activism is the erasure of the Jewish state. If it’s any
consolation, there will continue to be plenty of Chinese films to see.
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