The screening of a Mexican documentary film on life in Gaza, produced in collaboration with Hamas, which was scheduled to be held at Uruguay’s largest university, has been canceled, an American Jewish organization said on Wednesday.
The screening of the 2025 film “La Gran Palestina” or “Greater Palestine” at Universidad de la Republica on Wednesday evening was nixed after a public outcry, with opposition leaders asking how a propaganda piece by a terrorist group was scheduled to be shown at a public university.
The film was made “in collaboration with the combatants of the resistance (Hamas),” its accompanying flier states.
“At a time when anti-Israel rhetoric is spreading at Uruguay’s most prestigious public university, the cancellation of a documentary screening presenting Hamas’s perspective should be seen as a victory,” Ariel Gelblung, the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s director for Latin America, told JNS. “You can feel empathy with the Palestinians. But promoting terrorism is a red line that should not be crossed.”
The movie comes less than three years after the Hamas-led massacre in southern Israel killed some 1,200 people, in the worst single-day attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust.
“La Gran Palestina” was screened on July 1 at the Faculty of Humanities and Arts of the National University of Rosario in Argentina.
The university’s rector subsequently apologized and said he had not been aware of the event, Gelblung said.
The film, directed by Mexican filmmaker Rafael Rangel, is the second in a trilogy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with the third installment, “Trilogy of a Genocide,” under production.
The Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center pledged to “continue to expose antisemitism and the normalization of hate at public universities or elsewhere.”
The film is scheduled to be shown at Cornell in October.
