Search

Actress leaves film festival to join pro-Hamas rally

‘Scream’ star Melissa Barrera was previously fired for antisemitic posts.

By Susan Tawil, World Israel News

The Sundance Film Festival, America’s largest annual film event, convened this week in Park City, Utah.

Some 50,000 attendees, including Hollywood stars and film industry professionals, hobnob and view their pick of any of the nearly one hundred new movies premiering at the festival.

Lured by the vast amount of media exposure present at the event, a group of anti-Israel protesters showed up to hold a rally there on Sunday.

Film actress Melissa Barrera, 33, ditched the festival to attend the rally—the only celebrity from Sundance to join.

She held “Free Palestine” and “In Our Lifetime” posters and joined in the chanting of “Free, Free Palestine,” “From the River to the Sea.”

Standing in the light snow, Barrera wore a hooded coat with the requisite black and white checked kafia scarf—and sunglasses.

The crowd of about 100 marched along the city’s main street, waving Palestinian flags and placards, until police told them to “move along” and dispersed them.

A star in the horror flick “Scream,” Barrera was fired in November from acting in the movie’s upcoming sequel due to her anti-Israel activism.

Her Instagram posts called Israel’s defensive war on Hamas terrorists “Genocide” and “Ethnic Cleansing” and claimed that Gaza was “…being treated like a concentration camp…” These comments on social media drew the ire of the film’s producers, who said they have “zero tolerance for antisemitism or the incitement of hate in any form, including false references to genocide, ethnic cleansing, Holocaust distortion, or anything that flagrantly crosses the line into hate speech.”