Wall | DIVIDED THEY STAND Separated lives carry weight of powerful West Bank doc
Image credit: The Wall: Simone Bitton
DIVIDED THEY STAND Separated lives carry weight of powerful West Bank doc
Movie Review

Wall

EW's GRADE
B+

Details Rated: Unrated; Length: 98 Minutes; Genre: Documentary; Distributor: Lifesize

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.

Originally posted Aug 31, 2005 Published in issue #838-839 Sep 09, 2005 Order article reprints
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