From Tunnels To Fences – Palestine seen through IDFA eyes.

The CNN effect is very powerful. Your mind, confronted with a flood of painful images, creates a barrier that protects you from falling into complete distress. Hence, you no longer feel the same empathy towards scenes of war and bombing as you might have felt the first time round.

In the documentary realm, I find that films about a certain country in crisis rarely abstain from taking the “crisis” as the point of departure for their story. But not Elinor Burkett’s iThemba, about a band of young handicapped musicians from Zimbabwe, which mostly managed to skip past the political situation, instead focusing on the subjects themselves.

Of course it is difficult to resist including the political or economic crisis in a country, when this obviously influences the lives of the individuals within it. Nonetheless, it is often more rewarding when a filmmaker enters an individual’s microcosm and can fully go into depth instead of sketching out a generalising statement. For we have to wonder: can a whole society be told in 90 minutes?

In light of this, I set out to see the documentaries about Palestine in this year’s IDFA programme. Budrus, by Brazilian director Julia Bacha proved to be a truly poetic experience. It tells the story of a village in the West Bank along the border with Israel. The inhabitants peacefully protest against the construction of a fence on their land which would deprive them of their main source of income, olive trees. So well thought out and determined is their protest, that Israeli activists and people from all the over the world come to join in. Bacha employs subtle music, interviews, and reportage-style shots to paint the picture of a small political movement which inevitably impresses and surprises. It is a very simple, well-structured film that has a real story to tell.

Vibeke Lokkeberg’s film, with the all-too-apt title Tears of Gaza uses a very different approach. It undoubtedly has some of the most powerful and brutal footage of the bombings in Gaza, showing destroyed houses, murdered children, and devastating hospital scenes. Lokkeberg tells the story of three traumatised children who lost their parents in attacks. It is a painful film to watch, which brings up questions about what a film can and should show. Where are the limits? In itself, everything deserves and needs to be shown, but it depends on the way this is done. Lokkeberg abuses the pure force of brutal images and personal stories, even more so as they are told by young children. 90 minutes of pain, but they shock too much. As the good old CNN effect hits in, Tears of Gaza merely – and sadly so – becomes a film of misused potential.

Into the Belly of the Whale by Palestinian Hazim Bitar and Abu Jamil Street by Alexis Monchovet and Stephane Marchetti offer a fresh and focused angle on life in Gaza. We get to know the tunnel system running underneath the Palestinian-Egyptian border that permits the smuggling of goods and weapons. Part of the experimental Paradocs programme, Into the Belly of the Whale is the Palestinians’ comical take on a not-so-comical situation, for the tunnel bears multiple dangers: you can get stuck and suffocate, or the walls can crumble and bury you forever. Though it is a fictional film which does not feature outstanding actors or techniques, it does shed a new light coming from an insider (no pun intended). The documentary Abu Jamil Street tackles the subject of tunnels through a very simple and efficient narrative. Portraying the everyday life of the smugglers, who laugh and shout and bargain and dig, the film does not dramatise what is surely not always an easy situation. Instead, it reminds the audience that behind all the suffering, there is an everyday life equally worth being portrayed. It is a refreshing take on a situation which we have heard so much about that we run the risk of not listening any more.

In contrast to Tears of Gaza, films like Budrus and Abu Jamil Street depict the well-known Israel-Palestine conflict in a new light. Maybe light is the key here: when bombarded with CNN-effect inducing images, a certain lightness in the narrative helps us to do what is necessary: keep our eyes open.

By Mara Klein