A cinema house in Miami Beach, Florida, is urging city residents to oppose the city’s attempt to terminate their lease agreement after the theater screened an Oscar-winning documentary on Israel’s apartheid and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
City leaders, including Mayor Steven Meiner, have accused the theater, O Cinema, of promulgating “pro-Hamas” and “terrorist propaganda” by showing the film “No Other Land” — a documentary that showcases resistance to Israel’s violent dispossession of Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank.
Meiner has erroneously described the film as an “attack on the Jewish people that is not consistent with the values of our City and residents.”
“I am a staunch believer in free speech,” Meiner said in a statement earlier this month. “But normalizing hate and then disseminating antisemitism in a facility owned by the taxpayers…is unjust to the values of our city and residents and should not be tolerated.”
The film, which features both Palestinian and Israeli protagonists, recently won the 2025 Academy Award for Best Documentary. A description of the film reads:
For half a decade, Basel Adra, a Palestinian activist, films his community of Masafer Yatta being destroyed by Israel’s occupation, as he builds an unlikely alliance with an Israeli journalist who wants to join his fight. No Other Land is an unflinching account of a community’s mass expulsion and acts as a creative resistance to Apartheid and a search for a path towards equality and justice.
O Cinema operates on land that is leased out by the city. Meiner’s office has authored a city ordinance that would end that lease. The proposal, which is up for consideration by the city council on Wednesday, would also terminate tens of thousands of dollars in grant money the city has promised to O Cinema.
Notably, O Cinema frequently showcases Jewish-centric films, and the theater has been a longtime partner of the Miami Jewish Film Festival. Amid the mayor’s attacks on the theater, that film festival has still encouraged its social media followers to attend upcoming events at O Cinema.
Attempts to shutter the theater would likely be deemed illegal, says Jon M. Garon, a professor of law at Fort Lauderdale’s Nova Southeastern University who is considered an expert on free speech.
“Although the city has authority to revoke its grant for failure to meet the obligations provided in the grant, the city does not have the authority as retaliation for speech about which members of the city council or the mayor disagree,” Garon said. “Such power over a grant is precisely the form of censorship the First Amendment prohibits.”
Supporters of the theater and of free speech in general have voiced their opposition to the city’s proposed actions.
“This effort to censor films is beyond the pale of acceptable governmental action in a democracy, and is blatantly unconstitutional,” read a joint statement from PEN America’s Florida director Katie Blankenship and Artists at Risk Connection executive director Julie Trébault. “Politicians do not get to tell theaters what movies they can show just because they disagree with a film’s message.”
Representatives of the theater have also condemned Meiner’s threats.
“The threats of closing a cinema down because some people do not like the films we show certainly sounds like censorship to me,” O Cinema’s co-founder and board of directors chair Kareem Tabsch said in an interview with NPR last week. “We’ve always shown films that have sparked real strong sentiments and real strong opinions…. Throughout the years, we’ve certainly had vocal audience members or community members who’ve questioned some programming choices… But what we have never encountered is elected officials trying to dictate what we should and should not be showing.”
The theater’s CEO Vivian Marthell has also stated that the decision to continue screening “No Other Land” is “a bold reaffirmation of our fundamental belief that every voice deserves to be heard, even, and perhaps especially, when it challenges us.”
O Cinema is calling on “our friends, colleagues, and allies in the arts community to stand with us to continue to bring unrestricted and uncensored arts and dialogue to this community” by attending “the Miami Beach City Commission meeting on Wednesday, March 19, at 8:30 AM as we affirm our right to tell stories that matter,” Marthell also said in a statement.
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