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Some of Hollywood’s most ardent anti-Israel activists are flocking to Saudi Arabia this week for a government-sponsored film festival—and the kingdom is compensating them well for their time.
The Red Sea International Film Festival, which has been held annually in Jeddah since 2021 under the authority of the Saudi Ministry of Culture, has drawn a star-studded guest list including actors like Riz Ahmed, Juliette Binoche, Michael Caine, Kirsten Dunst, and Idris Elba—all of whom have accused Israel of committing atrocities in response to Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack and none of whom have spoken about Saudi Arabia’s human rights record.
Caine, who received a lifetime achievement award at the festival, has accused Israel of “starving” children in Gaza. Dunst, who signed a letter calling for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas soon after the Oct. 7 attack, made headlines in April 2024 when she defended The Zone of Interest director Jonathan Glazer’s remarks at the Academy Awards.
Glazer, whose film was set next door to the Auschwitz death camp during the Holocaust, used his Best International Feature Film acceptance speech to attack Israel.
“Our film shows where dehumanization leads, at its worst,” Glazer said. “Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many innocent people.”
Dunst, a supporter of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary election, said during an interview with Variety that her “interpretation was [Glazer] was saying that genocide is bad.”
Elba, who pulled out of a British Museum event after a group of anti-Israel activists protested the museum’s ties to companies supposedly connected to Israel’s “genocide” in Gaza, began attacking Israel even before Oct. 7 took vilifying the Jewish state mainstream. The actor, slated to speak at the Saudi festival on Wednesday, accused Israel of “brutality and bloodshed” as it responded to riots in the West Bank in 2021.
