[HCCN] film: GAZA STRIP Blue Hill Friday May 29

[Judy Robbins]

reminder

Peninsula Peace & Justice will be showing the film GAZA STRIP on  
Friday 5/29 at Blue Hill Library, 7:00 p.m. By extraordinary  
coincidence, Carolyn Coe, a journalist with WERU, is traveling with  
CodePink to Gaza and will be in Rafah on May 29, attempting to enter  
Gaza with supplies for children. Carolyn had spent part of December/ 
January in Amman, Jordan, and Syria interviewing Iraqi refugees at  
the time of the Israeli violent incursion into Gaza.



Following is a brief review of the film:

Beautiful, heartbreaking, raw and revealing
Daily Star

* * *

An unflinchingly honest portrayal of a population under siege
deserves the widest possible audience.
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs

  * * *

"Deserves merit and attention...one of the most
important documentaries of recent times."
Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice

synopsis:

Gaza Strip pushes the viewer headlong into the tumult of the Israeli- 
occupied Gaza, examining the lives and views of ordinary Palestinians.

The documentary often sees the world through the eyes of young  
people. The central character is Mohammed Hejazi, a 13-year-old  
paperboy in Gaza City, one of the young stone-throwers who risk their  
lives throwing rocks at Israeli tanks across the barbwire fences. As  
the newspapers arrive announcing Ariel Sharons victory in the Israeli  
elections, Mohammed offers up tirades against Arafat and Sharon  
alike. We also catch glimpses of his inner world: his sense of  
hopelessness, his sorrow at the IDF killing of his best friend, his  
conception of death.

As the camera floats through the Gaza Strip, we encounter signs of  
the occupation everywhere: crowds of Palestinians are making their  
way along the beach on foot, donkey carts and tractor trailers when  
the Israeli soldiers close the roads. The Palestinians interviewed as  
they pass by reveal a common internal conflict, between anger at the  
Israeli occupation and the desire to live in peace.

In the Khan Younis refugee camp, Gaza Strip documents an extremely  
controversial incident in February, which fell largely through the  
cracks of international scrutiny, when the Israeli Defense Forces  
used an unidentified, powerful gas during a firefight, hospitalizing  
over 200 Palestinians with severe recurrent convulsions.

Inside a Red Cross tent near an Israeli checkpoint, a Palestinian  
mother and daughter debate the politics of their situation. As night  
falls on their camp, the mother describes how Israeli soldiers came  
with bulldozers, leveled their home and destroyed all of their  
belongings.

The eye of the film is usually passive and watchful, sometimes almost  
invisible, even in the most intimate settings. When a Palestinian  
child is blown up in Rafah, we see the entire process of his  
internment, from morgue to mosque to grave, unblinkingly. The camera  
moves slowly over a Palestinian neighborhood being strafed by Israeli  
machine-gun fire, schoolchildren scattering.

Gaza Strip culminates in a nighttime raid in April, when Israeli  
bulldozers stormed into the Khan Younis refugee camp under the cover  
of tank and helicopter fire, and destroyed the homes of 450  
Palestinians  the first of many such armed incursions into Area A by  
the IDF.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mainetalk.org/pipermail/hccn_mainetalk.org/attachments/20090528/59ca33c4/attachment.htm>