WASHINGTON—Miami Beach Mayor Steven Meiner said on Wednesday he dropped his threat to evict an art house cinema from city property for screening Oscar-winning “No Other Land,” a film about the Israeli displacement of a Palestinian community in the West Bank.
The move came after multiple rights advocates and artists in recent days criticized Meiner’s threat and said it would violate free speech.
Meiner said earlier he sought to evict and halt future grant payments to the non-profit O Cinema in South Beach.
City commissioners were scheduled to vote on Wednesday on a resolution introduced by Meiner and made public last week.
In the session, a majority of the seven-member commission said they opposed the resolution, as did dozens of people who gathered.
Meiner said he would introduce another resolution aimed at encouraging O Cinema to show movies highlighting “a fair and balanced viewpoint of the current war” and it would be deferred to a later meeting.
Meiner called the movie “one-sided propaganda” and anti-Semitic. The film’s co-directors, Palestinian activist Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, dismissed anti-Semitism allegations.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and other rights advocates condemned Meiner’s earlier threat as being against free speech.
Despite winning the Oscar for documentary feature film, “No Other Land” has not been picked up by mainstream U.S. distributors.
