Miami Beach’s O Cinema Challenges Mayor’s Threats of Eviction Over ‘No Other Land’ Screenings

By programming the Academy Award-winning documentary No Other Land, the Miami Beach-based O Cinema attracted the ire of Mayor Steven Meiner, who last week put forth a proposal to defund and evict the independent theater. O Cinema currently operates in property owned by the city of Miami Beach. 

This sequence of events started on March 5, when Meiner penned a letter to O Cinema CEO Vivian Marthell, urging her to withdraw No Other Land from its programming on the basis that it is “a one-sided propaganda attack on the Jewish people that is not consistent with the values of our City and residents.” The film was scheduled for a weeklong run beginning March 7.

The next day, Marthell responded to the mayor, agreeing to cancel scheduled showtimes “due to the concerns of antisemitic rhetoric.” According to board member Kareem Tabsch, later that same day, Marthell held conversations with O Cinema staff, board members, and other stakeholders in the community.

Less than 12 hours after Marthell’s first response to Meiner, Marthell sent a follow-up email letting the mayor know that after further consideration, the cinema was moving forward with the screenings that weekend. On March 7, Marthell publicly confirmed in the Miami Herald that the film would indeed screen at O Cinema over the weekend. Provoked in part by the buzz of the local dispute and the film’s Oscar win, the screenings completely sold out. 

“My initial reaction to Mayor Meiner’s threats was made under duress,” Marthell said, in a prepared statement. “After reflecting on the broader implications for free speech and O Cinema’s mission, I (along with the O Cinema board and staff members) agreed it was critical to screen this acclaimed film.” 

“In our decade and a half history, the theater had never had an elected official reach out to  challenge us on our programming,” Tabsch, who co-founded O Cinema and is a documentary filmmaker whose credits include The Last Resort (2018) and Mucho Mucho Amor (2020), tells Documentary. “That letter came across as a thinly veiled threat to the future of the cinema—its funding, its space, its ability to continue showing.” 

In response to the theater’s defiance of his demands, Meiner’s resolution proposes ceasing a US$40,000 grant payment previously promised to the theater. This is the second half of what the city already agreed to pay between two grants, one totaling $25,831 and the other $54,071. On top of this, Meiner hopes to evict O Cinema from its government-owned lease on the grounds that its refusal to comply with Meiner’s request to not show the No Other Land instead platforms platforming “hateful propaganda” that hurts the Jewish community. 

Converse to Meiner’s allegations, O Cinema is a longtime partner of the Miami Jewish Film Festival and currently participates in an annual film series that centers the Holocaust. 

Many independent cinemas and cultural spaces in the U.S. lease their buildings from city governments. This has never meant that the government can dictate what they can or cannot present to audiences. 

“This effort to censor films is beyond the pale of acceptable governmental action in a democracy, and is blatantly unconstitutional,” Katie Blankenship, PEN America’s Florida director, said in a March 13 joint statement with Julie Trébault, executive director of the Artists at Risk Connection. “Politicians do not get to tell theaters what movies they can show just because they disagree with a film’s message.”

Jon M. Garon, professor of law at Fort Lauderdale’s Nova Southeastern University and expert on free speech in the pop culture industry, elaborates further on the constitutionality of Meiner’s proposal. “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 says. “Such power over a grant is precisely the form of censorship the First Amendment prohibits. Values equate to viewpoint, and governmental viewpoint discrimination is not tolerated under the First Amendment.” 

However, this is not the first time that U.S. elected officials have aggressively attempted to censor challenging artworks. In 1991, the POV premiere of Marlon Riggs’s seminal Tongues Untied on PBS led conservative politicians to condemn the film on the Senate floor and demand the defunding of public television. While certain affiliate stations chose not to air the film due to public outcry, PBS retained the right to broadcast. 

To Garon, the O Cinema case recalls a similar situation from 1999, when the Brooklyn Museum’s art exhibition “Sensation” caused then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani to spearhead a similar threat to rescind grant money. Most of the controversy stemmed from the inclusion of Chris Offil’s artwork The Holy Virgin Mary, which used elephant dung to render the Madonna. 

A district court provided a preliminary injunction that would halt the city’s attempt to revoke funding. The court went on to state: “The Supreme Court has made clear that, although the government is under no obligation to provide various kinds of benefits, it may not deny them if the reason for the denial would require a choice between exercising First Amendment rights and obtaining the benefit.”

Garon is hopeful that this precedent bodes well for O Cinema’s future operations: “It is reasonable to assume that a federal district court faced with this issue would resolve it by issuing an injunction just as the court did against New York in a similar situation.” 

In addition, Meiner’s allegations of No Other Land’s political stance are also similar to other declarations of the film’s supposed antisemitism by government officials. After the film’s world premiere in Berlin, outrage ensued when No Other Land was awarded the best documentary prize. Kai Wegner, the conservative mayor of Berlin, claimed that co-directors Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham’s acceptance speech was an “intolerable relativization.” He later wrote on X: “Anti-Semitism has no place in Berlin, and that also applies to the art scene. I expect the new management of the Berlinale to ensure that such incidents do not happen again.”

Claudia Roth, Germany’s minister of state for culture, came under intense scrutiny for applauding Adra and Abraham’s speech, with certain politicians calling for her resignation. Afterward, she asserted that her applause was only intended for Israeli co-director Abraham and not the Palestinian Adra. 

Of course, Roth’s claim is in opposition to the film’s radically non-hierarchical collaboration between Israeli and Palestinian filmmakers. Although Adra and Abraham are centered in the doc as protagonists, they share co-directing credit with the Palestinian Hamdan Ballal and Israeli Rachel Szor. As noted in the filmmakers’ Winter 2024/2025 cover story for Documentary, “[a]s a collective, the four committed to a decision-making process that required the agreement of all parties,” meaning that statements regarding the film are approved unanimously before being shared. 

In a March 13 social media post, Abraham shared his overt opposition to Meiner’s claims about No Other Land. “When the mayor uses the word antisemitism to silence Palestinians and Israelis who proudly oppose occupation and apartheid together, fighting for justice and equality, he is emptying it out of meaning,” he said. “I find that to be very dangerous. Censorship is always wrong.”

“We made this film to reach US audiences from a wide variety of political views,” Abraham continued. “I believe that once you see the harsh reality of occupation in Masafer Yatta in the West Bank, it becomes impossible to justify it, and that’s why the mayor is so afraid of No Other Land. It won’t work. Banning a film only makes people more determined to see it.” 

To Abraham’s point, O Cinema has extended its run of No Other Land by adding screenings on March 19 and 20; all four of these showtimes have already sold out. The nearby Coral Gables Art Cinema, located 11 miles from O Cinema and similarly housed in a government-owned building, has also started showing No Other Land.

Marthell and Tabsch are urging the local community and the broader film industry to get involved. 

“It is imperative to protect the First Amendment rights of art house cinemas and the communities they serve, ensuring they remain a sanctuary for thought-provoking, boundary-pushing content that reflects the needs of our society,” said IDA Executive Director Dominic Asmall Willsdon and Art House Convergence Managing Director Kate Markham in a joint statement, published on March 14. “To let the decision to close O Cinema stand is a direct affront to the United States’ foundational value of free speech, the constitutional rights afforded by our democracy, and the commitment public officials have made to serve their constituents and their communities.”

At the time of publication, over 300 filmmakers have signed an open letter to the city of Miami Beach condemning this proposal and its intended censorship of O Cinema. Among the signees are veteran producer Marie Therese Guirgis, Miami-based filmmakers and Third Horizon co-founders Keisha Rae Witherspoon and Jason Fitzroy Jeffers, Selena y los Dinos (2025) filmmaker Isabel Castro, and the Oscar-nominated director of Fire of Love (2022), Sara Dosa. 

“In a landscape where it is harder than it ever has been to be a documentary filmmaker, it is so important that we don’t give an inch in this fight,” notes Tabsch. 

On Wednesday, March 19, city commissioners will vote on Meiner’s proposal at a hybrid meeting at 8:30 a.m. Those interested in defending the theater's First Amendment rights can use this link to send a pre-composed email to the mayor and commissioners opposing this proposal; filmmakers can join in signing the open letter; and finally, individuals can donate directly to O Cinema. A toolkit with further information and resources can be accessed here.

“The moment that we allow folks to start deciding what is permissible for each other to watch or view or not is when our freedoms further erode,” Tabsch warns. “Today it's this little theater in this tiny corner of Miami Beach, but tomorrow it's in your backyard.”

Natalia Keogan is a critic and journalist based in NYC. Her bylines include Filmmaker magazine, A.V. Club, Reverse Shot, and Paste, amongst others.