Award-winning film director Mira Nair has decided to boycott September’s Haifa International Film Festival in protest of Israel’s “Apartheid” policies, she announced on her Twitter account Friday.

Nair, originally from India, began as an actress before becoming a director of documentary films and feature films. Her first feature film Salaam Bombay! was nominated for an academy award for best foreign language film in 1988. She subsequently gained fame as the director of such films as Monsoon Wedding, Vanity Fair and Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love. Nair was educated at Delhi University and Harvard.

Nair said Friday that she had been invited to Israel as a guest of honor at the Haifa International Film Festival with her new film The Reluctant Fundamentalist, an adaptation of the Mohsin Hamid novel of the same name which boasts Kate Hudson and Liev Schreiber among its stars.

“I will not be going to Israel at this time. I will go to Israel when the walls come down. I will go to Israel when occupation is gone,” Nair wrote.

“I will go to Israel when the state does not privilege one religion over another,” she continued. “I will go to Israel when Apartheid is over.”