Dilemmas and Distractions at the Premiere of “Incitement”

I. Incitement

As the director began his speech introducing the film to the audience at the Toronto International Film Festival last September, I turned to a colleague sitting to my right and declared, “There’s a 50/50 chance this movie will be interrupted.”

I had seen this picture before. Not the actual movie, Incitement, which on that September evening in Toronto was being shown for the first time to international audiences, and which last week finally opened in the U.S. But any public event with an Israeli theme might have been fair game for the merry pranksters of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement—one of its current strategies being seemingly spontaneous eruptions of protesters situated strategically throughout a crowd. I had witnessed many such flash mobsters on the Internet or television, so a premiere of a film dramatizing the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzḥak Rabin from the point of view of the assassin, and attended by the Israeli consul general in Toronto and other dignitaries, seemed a likely target.