TIFF's Unacceptable Rejection/Reversal: "The Road Between Us"

Tribe of Nova music festival 

"We are shocked and saddened that a venerable film festival has defied its mission and censored its own programming by refusing this film."

Ultimately, film is an art form that stimulated debate from every perspective that can both entertain us and make us uncomfortable."

"A film festival lays out the feast and the audience decides what they will or won't see."

Canadian filmmaker Barry Avrich 

 

"[The filmmakers did not secure] legal clearance of all footage [among the conditions the festival had requested to mitigate] known risks around the screening of a film about highly sensitive subject matter, including potential threat of significant disruption."

"[However], claims that the film was rejected due to censorship are unequivocally false."

"I remain committed to working with the filmmaker to meet TIFF's screening requirements to allow the film to be screened at this year's festival."

"I have asked our legal team to work with the filmmaker on considering all options available."

Toronto International Film Festival, CEO Cameron Bailey

 

"TIFF's CEO delivers textbook damage control."

"Apologetic tone with compassion buzzwords. Denies censorship while censoring."

"@TIFF_NET invited the October 7th film. They called it important. Then they withdrew it for phantom legal reasons forcing October 7th survivors to seek Hamas permission for massacre footage."

"Zero transparency on core outrage. PR perfume on institutional moral rot."

Idit Shamir, Israeli Consul General, Toronto Mission

 

The Toronto International Film Festival pulled a documentary from its 2025 lineup over footage rights and security issues, according to media reports. The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue details one family's experiences of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. (Chris Pizzello/Invision/The Associated Press)

 

Following the initial news that the Toronto International Film Festival after inviting a screening of the film The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue, at the upcoming September 2025 festival, had cancelled the invitation, the film world, its audience, social media, Jewish organizations and politicians expressed their outrage. That outrage was spurred by the sanctimonious reason given by the organizers of TIFF, that they feared copyright infringement, along with the potential for aggravated protests by those who would label the documentary Israeli propaganda.

 

That 'Israeli propaganda' was in fact, an issue with the very bodycam videos that some of the thousands of terrorists belonging to Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Fatah and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, along with ordinary Palestinian civilians video recording their deadly rampage consisting of savage mass rapes, sadistic torture of women who were then raped and murdered; all of it enjoyed by those committing the atrocities. Proud of their performance, and eager to show the world the extent and depth of their inhumanity, the videos speedily found their way on social media, posted by the perpetrators. 

 

“The Road Between Us” is a documentary about retired IDF General Noam Tibon’s quest to rescue his granddaughters and others at Kibbutz Nahal Oz when Hamas attacked on Oct.7, 2023.

 

Some of that footage has since been seen on social media sites, attesting to the barbarity of those who committed the gruesome acts of killing in cold blood; the storming of the agrarian southern Israel near the Gaza border where farming communities lived and thrived and gave employment to Gazans and trusted them as neighbours meaning no harm, even though some of those they had become familiar with took part in the barbarism, as well as having drawn maps for the edification of the terrorists to point out where each kibbutz security station had been established so that the security personnel could be killed first to take them out of action.

 

What followed was a wholesale carnage of living human beings, hunted down at the nearby music festival where fleeing youth were caught, some killed outright, women mutilated and raped, those seeking shelter in the sparse landscape gunned down, others sheltering in nearby latrines with locked doors shot to death through the wooden walls. In the kibbutzim, families locked themselves into their safe rooms, only to have their homes torched and families of parents and children immolated. Children forced to witness their parents mutilated and shot, and they then met the same fate. 

 

 

The Palestinian marauders gathered hostages; children, the elderly, women, a handful of Israeli soldiers, foreign farm workers, to take them to Gaza as prisoners in exchange for Palestinian terrorists found guilty of crimes against Israelis and incarcerated in Israeli prisons. The hostages, both living and corpses were valued as trade objects, kept in many of the airless tunnels Hamas had built, where they were tormented, starved and deprived of hope as medical conditions were unmet by gloating terrorists who viewed them all as expendable humanity.

 

These are the 'owners' of the videos reflecting the savage barbarity that a civilian population had been subjected to on that fateful day of October 7, 2023. And it was to Hamas that the filmmakers, Melbar Entertainment Group and director Barry Avrich were expected to appeal to for permission to use the footage, which had, needless to say, been in the public arena for years in a proud demonstration of the 'struggle' against 'occupation', of a people that propagandized their victimhood for Western consumption.

 

The film documented the story of retired Israel Defense Forces General Noam Tibon who had sped from Tel Aviv to Kibbutz Nahal Oz on October 7, determined to rescue his son Amir's family. TIFF had informed Deadline magazine that the filmmakers failed to secure 'legal clearance of all footage'. Clearly the most lame, absurd 'reason' in law and human relations as a reason to cancel the film's screening.  

 

"I was troubled to hear that when my office contacted TIFF to better understand its decision, TIFF shared its generic media statement without offering an opportunity to discuss further."

"I encourage TIFF to further its dialogue with the Jewish community and other relevant stakeholders to better understand their concerns."

Member of Provincial Parliament Stan Cho/Minister of Tourism, Culture and Gaming 

 

"Tell Ontario and Canada: No more funding for cultural capitulation [where the provincial and federal governments are financial sponsors for TIFF']" read a social media statement by the group Canadian Women against antisemitism. 

 

"It is unconscionable that TIFF is allowing a small mob of extremists -- whose use of intimidation and threats of violence -- to dictate what films Canadians can see at the festival."

"This shameful decision sends an unmistakable message: Toronto's Jewish community, which has long played an integral role at TIFF, is no longer safe or welcome", was the message from Canada's Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs. 

 

TikTok, Y'All Listening/Viewing?

"[Poll: Nearly a third of Americans aged 18 to 24 think the statement] Hamas terrorists killed 1,400 Israeli civilians by shooting them, raping and beheading people including whole families, kids and babies [is false]."

Harvard  University and Harris Insights and Analytics

"[TikTok's parent company] collaborates with public security bureaus across China, including in [the western province of] Xinjiang where it plays an active role in disseminating the party state's propaganda on Xinjiang."

2019 Australian Strategic Policy Institute report

"In our studies, something like almost 40 percent of young people, when they're looking for a place for lunch, they don't go to Google Maps or Search."

"They go to TikTok or Instagram."

Google senior vice-president Prabhakar Raghavan

 

In the partisan approach by lookers-on of the conflict between the State of Israel and the Hamas rulers of Gaza in the Middle East, a majority of Westerners quietly unite in support of Israel following the horrific terrorist attack on border civilians in towns, villages and kibbutzim who were massacred, raped, and taken hostage back into Gaza by the terrorist marauders. And then there is the gap that appears between generations where another segment of the population loudly and emphatically supports Hamas.

Close to 80 percent of Americans state their belief of Hamas as "terrorists", while merely 59 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds concur. Of the younger demographic, over half agree with the contention that the attacks by Hamas "can be justified by the grievance of Palestinians", in comparison to fewer than a quarter of the overall population.

Established facts in reflection of the picture in the round and historical antecedents appear to make no impression on the minds of this divergent-opinion younger demographic. Denial of the sadistic savagery demonstrated by the Hamas terrorists during their October 7 violent incursion into Israel, much less the denial that Hamas is a terrorist organization leaves the question: what inspires these young people to think as they do?

Just as a healthy diet makes for a healthy body, it seems credible to many in the field of human psychology that a steady diet of questionable and even baldly false faux news makes for a tainted mindset. And TikTok seems to be one of the main culprits involved in this mystery. In Canada, national security concerns led to the federal government banning the app from civil servants' phones, and it was further abandoned in the interests of security by politicians.

The company owning TikTok which is Byte Dance, is China-based, and the Chinese Communist Party demands loyalty from all Chinese, companies and individuals alike, wherever in the world they happen to be. Demanding access to users' data or the app's use for surveillance purposes are both not only likely to occur, but almost guaranteed. Even though TikTok claims to have self-corrected moderation guidelines there is no way to know who has ultimate control of its content or its use of collected data.

Generation Zers now use TikTok as a primary news source and search engine. TikTok was rife with mis- and disinformation when Russia invaded Ukraine. Influencers unwittingly took what they found there as factual and in turn spread the propaganda. Anti-Israel bot farms appear very actively on the app to influence the narrative and boost support for Hamas under the screen of "pro-Palestine" hashtags.

 

Above: Instagram post with misleading caption about NYU students’ chant

 

The app's powerful algorithm, once a viewer focuses on an item, feeds them greater amounts of what they have viewed and interacted with. Watching or commenting on merely one or two pro-Hamas or anti-Israel posts launches a veritable avalanche of them. Their purpose is to spread distorted truth, outright falsehoods and antisemitism.

All of which, when viewers are sufficiently steeped in the propaganda they eventually take for reality, leads them to denial of the horrors of the atrocities committed during the massive terrorist attack, feeling an obligation to defend the actions of the terrorists, since what they have ingested through the false news they feed on and digested, leads them to view it all as the truth and Hamas the victim of Israel. 

All of which led young people across North America and elsewhere to bring these views to the public fore, taking part in 'pro-Palestine' protests and demonstrations, and there passionately shouting such antisemitic slogans as "from the river to the sea", spelling out the threatened obliteration of Israel itself, the foundational goal of Hamas which isn't listed as a terrorist group in most Western countries for no reason at all.

 

"TikTok is hardly alone. One post on X, formerly Twitter, was viewed more than 20,000 times and flagged as misleading by London-based social media watchdog Reset for purporting to show Israelis staging civilian deaths for cameras. Another X post the group flagged, viewed 55,000 times, was an antisemitic meme featuring Pepe the Frog, a cartoon that has been appropriated by far-right white supremacists. On Instagram, a widely shared and viewed video of parachuters dropping in on a crowd and captioned “imagine attending a music festival when Hamas parachutes in” was debunked over the weekend and, in fact, showed unrelated parachute jumpers in Egypt. (Instagram later labeled the video as false.)"

CNN Business

Above: TikTok video showing misleading text and footage