Film by Holocaust denier pulled from Australian film festival

SYDNEY, July 10 (AFP) - A controversial film made by British historian and Holocaust-denier David Irving was pulled Thursday from the schedule of a Melbourne film festival for fear of protest.

Richard Wolstencroft, the director of the Melbourne Underground Film Festival, said demonstrators had blocked organisers from entering a venue where the film was to have screened Thursday.

BizVantage – A Net clipping service that learns what you need: for business, investment or technology.
Try the free, no-hassle 6 month trial!

"All kinds of ugliness has happened," Wolstencroft said.

"It's far too scary... We will never play another film by a historical revisionist again."

Wolstencroft declined to say whether festival organisers had received threats over its screening of the film or who had locked the cinema.

Earlier this week Australia's Jewish community failed in its legal bid to have the film, "The Search for the Truth in History," banned.

The Jewish Community Council of Victoria state said the film vilified Jewish people and incited others to hate Jews.

It lodged a complaint two weeks ago with the Equal Opportunities Commission, claiming the film breached Victoria's Racial and Religious Tolerance Act.

Irving made the film in response to having been banned from entering Australia in 1993.

Australasian Union of Jewish Students Victorian vice president Geoffrey Kozminsky, who was among the demonstrators Thursday, welcomed the cancellation.

"We're happy that Melbourne's holocaust survivors don't have to be subjected to lies, anti-Semitism and racism, after everything they have been through," he said.

Wolstencroft said while the festival did not support Irving's ideas "we do support his right to freedom of speech."

"Australians do have the right to hear his perspective."

Irving has been turned down for an Australian visa three times, most recently in January, in part due to his 1992 conviction in Germany for defaming the memory of the dead.

Irving has written numerous accounts denying the reality of the Holocaust -- Nazi Germany's systematic slaughter of some six million Jews between 1933 and 1945.

Wolstencroft said the festival would "happily programme anything by the Jewish community" next year.

ld/lg

Australia-cinema-Holocaust