Israelis ask Oscars to drop suicide bomb film

Israelis ask Oscars to drop suicide bomb film

A group of Israelis who lost children to Palestinian suicide bombings appealed on Wednesday to organizers of next week's Academy Awards to disqualify a film exploring the reasoning behind such attacks.

The bereaved parents said they had gathered more than 32,000 signatures on a petition against the nomination in the best foreign film category of "Paradise Now," a drama about two West Bank friends recruited to blow themselves up in Tel Aviv.

The controversial film was made by an Israeli Arab director and actors working with a Palestinian crew and locations. The producer was a Jewish Israeli and the funding was European.

Yossi Zur, whose teenage son Asaf was killed in a bus bombing, accused the film of sympathetically portraying a tactic hailed by many Palestinians waging a 5-year-old uprising.

"What they call 'Paradise Now' we call 'hell now', each and every day," Zur told reporters. "It is a mission of the free world not to give such movies a prize."

Film industry experts said it was unheard of for an Oscar nomination to be withdrawn. This year's ceremony is on March 5.

Major Israeli cinema chains have shunned "Paradise Now," with distribution experts citing concern that its portrayal of suicide bombers could spell a low box-office turnout and even boycotts.

The film shows Palestinians bemoaning the travails of life under Israeli occupation, yet its characters also debate whether this warrants resorting to violence.

One of the protagonists takes on his deadly mission to exonerate guilt over a relative who spied for Israel, a comment on the complex pressures within Palestinian society.

Palestinians seeking independence in the West Bank and Gaza, which Israel captured in a 1967 war, won limited self-rule under interim accords that formed the Palestinian Authority. Some Jews opposed ceding the land, seeing it as their biblical birthright.

Fighting that erupted in 2000 and last month's victory in Palestinian elections of the Islamic militant group Hamas have dimmed hopes for peaceful two-state co-existence.

C0-PRODUCTION

Despite its controversial subject, "Paradise Now" won a Golden Globe prize in January, boosting its Oscar prospects.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is already debating how to present the provenance of the film. The academy's Web site had listed it as coming from "Palestine," drawing Israeli complaints as the state does not yet exist.

The controversy around "Paradise Now" compounds an already fraught Academy Awards for Israel, thanks to several nominations garnered by Steven Spielberg's "Munich."

A thriller about the reprisals the Jewish state launched after 11 of its athletes died in a Palestinian raid on the 1972 Olympic Games, Munich has been accused by pro-Israel groups of skewing history and criticizing Israeli security policies.

Spielberg called the film his "prayer for peace."