Mayor Steve Meiner looked almost apologetic on Wednesday at Miami Beach’s City Hall as he declared he would withdraw his own proposal, which threatened to terminate the arthouse theater O Cinema’s current lease and grant funding because it had screened the Oscar-winning Palestinian-Israeli documentary No Other Land. At times he seemed to contradict himself, admitting his resolution should have been “more open to discussion” while claiming it also wasn’t “healthy to debate.” With tears welling up, he told the packed chambers, “But I just want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, even though some of you said things that were hurtful: I love you all, I really, really do.”
The proposal had been announced in an email newsletter sent on March 11, in which Meiner accused the film — which shows harrowing on-the-ground footage of the destruction of a West Bank village by Israeli soldiers between 2019 and 2023 — of being “egregiously antisemitic.” He claimed that his proposed legislation was intended for the city, which currently rents space to the theater at South Beach’s Historic City Hall, to “move on from O Cinema, as permitted by our contract, and seek a cultural partner that better aligns with our community values.”
Meiner’s threat received national attention; over 700 filmmakers and creatives (including Barry Jenkins, Phil Lord, Laura Poitras) signed an open letter of support for the single-screen nonprofit cinema, calling the proposal an “act of censorship.” The same tenor of indignation dominated the room during Wednesday’s city-commissioner meeting, in which nearly a hundred constituents and defenders of O Cinema let loose on Meiner — both for the threat to the theater and for the fact that Meiner had chosen not to take questions at a virtual town hall held the night before — one minute at a time.
A woman who drove down from Broward County jokingly excused the pink rollers in her hair and pronounced that “Miami Beach sucks now.” O Cinema, she said, “is the only reason” she ever comes by anymore. A young O Cinema supporter later echoed the sentiment: “I got up at 6 a.m. to be here and I don’t get up at 6 a.m. for anything.” Others against Meiner’s proposal identified as Zionists and disagreed with his claim that he was “speaking for 90 percent of the Jewish community.” Local filmmakers and members of Jewish Voice for Peace and the Miami DSA also spoke. Mountains filmmaker Monica Sorelle took her allotted minute to quote a statement from No Other Land co-director Yuval Abraham, and referenced a recent hate crime in which a Jewish Miami Beach resident shot two Israeli tourists because he believed they were Palestinians — an example of how hatred spreads blindly.
The mayor’s defense was limited from the audience; less than a dozen spoke in favor of the proposal. One man compared No Other Land to D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. Two other supporters were fellow South Florida mayors, Hialeah’s Esteban Bovo Jr. and Miami’s Francis Suarez, along with the consul general of Israel in Miami, Maor Elbaz-Starinsky. Meiner allowed all three to speak for longer than a minute, though that overtime was eventually drowned out by constituents chanting “one minute’s up!” (Elbaz-Starinsky responded by calling the constituents “antisemites.”) Elsewhere, the audience objected to the mayor claiming that O Cinema has never screened a film that shows “the Israeli perspective.” (“It’s co-produced and directed by Israelis!” someone shouted.)
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That Meiner (who claims he has, in fact, seen the film) dropped his proposal was perhaps not surprising, considering that the majority of the city’s six commissioners had encouraged him to do so. But he also deferred a vote on a second resolution, which would “encourage” the theater to show films that “highlight a fair and balanced viewpoint of the current war.” An email from O Cinema went out Friday afternoon, addressed to friends and supporters, vowing to “remain in conversation with the city until it is resolved.”
Dangling threads didn’t seem to dampen the mood after the meeting on Wednesday, however, as commissioner Joseph Magazine encouraged everyone present to take a photo together as a “sign of unity.” Only one, commissioner David Suarez, refused. (During the meeting, Suarez had called No Other Land “a megaphone for Hamas sympathizers” and declared that “most of the people here would be the first victims of Hamas.” He also went into graphic detail about how “women would be sexually mutilated, thrown off rooftops, and stoned to death.”)
Still, O Cinema co-founders Vivian Marthell and Kareem Tabsch — who remained stoic during the entire proceedings — are relieved with the outcome. “I think we’re all overwhelmed by the positive support that we received from the community and encouraged by seeing democracy at work and hearing opposing viewpoints,” Tabsch told Vulture after the meeting. “I think the commission did the right thing today and that we came out victorious at the same time.”
“I totally feel hopeful. We’ve been within the city of Miami Beach for ten years,” Marthell added. “Our programming speaks for itself. It’s varied, it’s diverse, it speaks to our communities, it speaks to our issues, and it speaks to having dialogue.”
O Cinema was the first theater in South Florida to screen No Other Land. When Meiner caught wind of this, he sent the theater a letter, asking them to remove screenings of the film and claiming it was “a one-sided propaganda attack on the Jewish people.” Marthell and Tabsch declined, to which Meiner responded with the proposed threat to their lease and funding. The theater owners nevertheless continued offering more screenings of the film (which despite its Oscar win for Best Documentary, remains without an American distributor). “Should we have capitulated to the mayor’s demands it would have been a betrayal of our mission and of our audience,” Tabsch said. “We couldn’t allow our first amendment right to free speech be trampled on because if we had, where would it stop? It wouldn’t just end at O Cinema and we could not allow that to happen to us and to our community.”
This is far from the first attempt by South Florida politicians at interfering with film programming. In 2000, the city of Miami pulled $50,000 worth of county funding from the Miami Film Festival for screening the Cuban film La Vida Es Silbar, though the motion was ultimately repealed. More recently, in 2022, District 3 Commissioner Joe Carollo — notorious for a lawsuit over his weaponization of city departments against local businesses in Little Havana — wrested control of the Tower Theater, the only multi-screen first-run art cinema in Miami, away from Miami Dade College and Miami Film Festival. The venue is now closed most of the time.
Other forms of Palestinian art have been pulled elsewhere in Miami amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. As the Miami New Times reported, the city’s Institute of Contemporary Art and arts organizations like Oolite Arts have taken down works relating to Palestine. Artist Charles Gaines has said the ICA asked him to alter one piece of art and to leave another out of a career retrospective of his work.
Tabsch and Marthell sound relieved that O Cinema has so far evaded the same fate as Tower Theater. But they are careful not to speak ill of those who threatened them. “Having good relationships with our elected officials is important,” Tabsch said, “and I hope that this is a bump in the road and we can get back to the great relationship we had going forward.”
