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Venice for Palestine

V4P was born in the summer of 2025 from the spontaneous coming-together of audiovisual professionals united by horror and rage at the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people carried out by the Israeli government and army. V4P is part of that collective movement of dissent and denunciation that has begun to express itself in organized forms — from the Global Sumud Flotilla to the #NoBavaglio network, to all those groups that organized the protest on August 30th at the Venice Lido.

With the intention of bringing the Palestinian struggle to the center of public discourse at the Venice Film Festival, V4P addressed an open letter inviting the Biennale, the Festival, and the entire audiovisual industry to take clear positions against the genocide. The letter received an extraordinary response, in Italy and abroad, surpassing 2,000 signatures within days from industry professionals, artists, festivals, cultural associations, trade unions, and category organizations — suddenly bringing Palestine to the center of the Festival's public conversation and keeping it there until the last day of the event, thanks in part to the enormous media echo generated by the open letter and the collective's subsequent request to withdraw invitations to figures such as Gal Gadot and Gerard Butler, who have publicly expressed support for the Israeli government and army over the years.

In keeping with the spirit of the open letter to the Biennale, V4P made several requests to the Festival, first among them to give voice to the Palestinian people, with the aim of bringing their stories of suffering and resistance to the center of the world stage. For these reasons, it proposed giving representation to Palestinian artists who had expressed their willingness to share their testimony.

During the Festival, V4P also organized a meeting with Eyal Sivan, an anti-Zionist Israeli filmmaker and representative of the BDS movement, to explore how cultural boycott can be a fundamental weapon in combating the propaganda of Israeli government cultural apparatuses.

The discussion around cultural boycott and around recognizing the entanglement of global cultural institutions with their Israeli counterparts became central to the collective's activity in the following months. On the occasion of the Rome Film Fest, V4P organized the conference Zero Complicity, which laid the groundwork for building an awareness campaign encouraging Italian cultural institutions to sever any relationship of complicity with their Israeli counterparts, as expressions of a government that continues to commit crimes against humanity.

In the months that followed, V4P continued its own protest initiatives, such as the call to boycott the 13th Italian Film Festival in Israel and the open letter to the European Film Academy; it also supported and amplified initiatives led by others, such as the appeal by Iranian director Farhadi and the national Black Friday strike, and continues to take part in debates on ethics, solidarity, and responsibility in cinema and culture.

V4P will be present at Venice 83 with several initiatives, including the panel "AND YET GAZA KEEPS BURNING: a multi-voice discussion on tools and practices against complicity with genocide," to be held on Tuesday, September 8th at 5:30 PM at the Giornate degli Autori (Venice Days) gazebo.