Florida mayor drops threat to evict cinema for screening 'No Other Land'

By Kanishka Singh

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Miami Beach Mayor Steven Meiner said on Wednesday he dropped his threat to evict an art house cinema from city property for screening Oscar-winning "No Other Land," a film about the Israeli displacement of a Palestinian community in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

The move came after multiple rights advocates and artists in recent days criticized Meiner's threat and said it would violate free speech.

Meiner said earlier he sought to evict and halt future grant payments to the non-profit O Cinema in South Beach.

City commissioners were scheduled to vote on Wednesday on a resolution introduced by Meiner and made public last week.

In the session, a majority of the seven-member commission said they opposed the resolution, as did dozens of people who gathered.

Meiner said he would introduce another resolution aimed at encouraging O Cinema to show movies highlighting "a fair and balanced viewpoint of the current war" and it would be deferred to a later meeting.

Meiner called the movie "one-sided propaganda" and antisemitic. The film's co-directors, Palestinian activist Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, dismissed antisemitism allegations.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and other rights advocates condemned Meiner's earlier threat as being against free speech.

Despite winning the Oscar for documentary feature film, "No Other Land" has not been picked up by mainstream U.S. distributors.

The film shows Israeli soldiers tearing down homes and evicting residents to create a military training ground and the encroachment of Jewish settlers on the Palestinian community.

The directors accused Washington of blocking a solution to the decades old Israeli-Palestinian conflict whose latest bloodshed involves the ongoing devastating Israeli military assault on Gaza following a deadly October 2023 Hamas attack.

(Reporting by Kanishka Singh; Editing by Sandra Maler and Lincoln Feast.)