Variety reported on Thursday Sept 17 that TIFF would be dropping the planned screenings of “London Fields” from the festival. What’s really intriguing about this announcement is that it appears that no one can agree on what the reason behind pulling the film is exactly. The official statement from TIFF was that the film would not be shown because of disagreements between the director (Matthew Cullen) and the producers concerning the creative vision of the version of the film that would be screened. However, everyone involved seems to have a different story. According to the producers, TIFF elected to pull the film based on it containing imagery “deemed too provocative.” Meanwhile, Cullen, the director, has initiated a lawsuit against the producers citing many grievances including revisions of the film without his consent, failure to pay his full compensation, and refusal to provide 3 separate cuts of the film. The revisions cited in the lawsuit seem to be where the accusation of provocative imagery comes from with the article citing “incendiary imagery evoking 9/11 jumpers edited against pornography, as well as juxtaposing the holiest city in Islam against mind control.” Film festival censorship, and censorship in general, is a controversial topic when looking at what is deemed within the reasonable limits of appropriateness and what crosses the line into obscene and most important of all who makes that decision. Censorship of festival screenings was a topic that came up during my research for the Hong Kong International Film Festival. The Chinese Film Bureau censored the programs of HKIFF and removed films that were critical of the People’s Republic of China as well as films that contained provocative or obscene (in the opinion of the bureau) material or topics. TIFF pulling this film is interesting because its unclear what the exact reasoning is or if it is an actual case of film censorship. Does the imagery mentioned above cross the supposed line that separates appropriate artist vision from the obscenely offensive? Or is film censorship not an appropriate response no matter how troubling or harsh the imagery and topics are in the 21st century?