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DIVIDED THEY STAND Separated lives carry weight of powerful West Bank doc
The Wall: Simone Bitton
Credits
Rated: Unrated; Length: 98 Minutes; Genre: Documentary
B+
Lisa Schwarzbaum
Lisa Schwarzbaum is a film critic for EW
As if she could make the hated thing dissolve by gazing at it with enough intensity, TV documentarian Simone Bitton stared with her camera eye as a ''security fence'' hundreds of miles long was erected in 2002 to separate Israelis from Palestinians in the West Bank. In Wall, her stately, outraged partisan nonfiction film, Bitton — a self-described ''Arab Jew'' based in Paris and Jerusalem — makes clear that she finds both the concept and the concrete absurd at best, and a tragedy at worst. The interviews she conducts, almost all with Arabs and Jews who share her despair, are less meaningful than what she captures in silence: the sight of farmers separated from their farmland, everyday people thwarted in their dailiness, and children playing next to what looks like prison walls.
Posted Aug 31, 2005
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