(IPYS/IFEX) – In a surprising move, the organizers of the launch of the book “La Pantalla Prohibida”, by Marco Antonio de la Parra and Daniel Olave, decided to suspend the screening of the film “The Last Temptation of Christ”. The organizers were fearful that the screening would result in the closure of the Arte Alameda […]
(IPYS/IFEX) – In a surprising move, the organizers of the launch of the book “La Pantalla Prohibida”, by Marco Antonio de la Parra and Daniel Olave, decided to suspend the screening of the film “The Last Temptation of Christ”. The organizers were fearful that the screening would result in the closure of the Arte Alameda cinema -where the film would have been screened- and that the audience and the organizers would be arrested.
The film was scheduled to be screened following the presentation of Olave’s and de la Parra’s book, which deals with film censorship in Chile.
“The Last Temptation of Christ”, by Martin Scorsese, is prohibited from being shown in Chile since January 1997, when a Supreme Court ruling concluded that the figure of Christ had been “distorted and humiliated and his honour damaged, and that this could not be excused by saying that it was all a fantasy” (see IFEX alert of 15 March 2001).
Nevertheless, on 5 February 2001, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights condemned the Chilean state for having violated “the right to freedom of thought and expression consecrated in Article 13 of the American Convention on Human Rights,” and granted the government six months to reverse the ruling which did not comply with the inter-american agreement.
Francisco Tepper, general manager of Grijalbo, the book’s publishing house and one of the organizers of the launch, told IPYS that “we found out in the afternoon from a report by VTR’s lawyers – VTR is a Chilean cable company that co-organized the event- who advised VTR’s Executive President Blas Tomic to not get involved with the film’s screening because of the risk that the audience would be detained and, even more of a concern to us, that the cinema would be closed.”
Tepper added that “there was some misunderstanding, I thought that this was going to be a private event.”
Veronica Rubio, in charge of public relations for VTR, informed IPYS that at first the screening was planned as a private event with a smaller number of spectators, something which is not prohibited by the censorship law. However, Rubio noted that “subsequently we invited more people and the event took on another aspect. That is why we decided to screen ‘El Imperio de los Sentidos’ instead, which is a much stronger film, and suspend the screening of ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’, to prevent any legal problems as it is a banned film.”
According to Tepper, what happened was
“unfortunate, because the potential risk led to us censoring ourselves.”
Rumours had circulated that the organisation El Porvenir de Chile (Chile’s Future) – the same organisation that had filed an appeal with the Supreme Court and succeeded in having the film banned – threatened to start legal proceedings against the launch’s organizers were they to screen the film in public. However, Grijalbo and VTR emphatically denied these rumours.
