<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">reminder<div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Following is a brief review of the film:</div><div><br></div><div><p align="center" style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 16.0px 0.0px; text-align: center"><font face="Arial" size="5" style="font: 16.0px Arial">Beautiful, heartbreaking, raw and revealing<br> Daily Star</font></p><p align="center" style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 16.0px 0.0px; text-align: center"><font face="Arial" size="5" style="font: 16.0px Arial">* * *</font></p><p align="center" style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 16.0px 0.0px; text-align: center"><font face="Arial" size="5" style="font: 16.0px Arial">An unflinchingly honest portrayal of a population under siege<br> deserves the widest possible audience.<br> Washington Report on Middle East Affairs</font></p><p align="center" style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 16.0px 0.0px; text-align: center"><font face="Arial" size="5" style="font: 16.0px Arial"> * * *</font></p><p align="center" style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 16.0px 0.0px; text-align: center"><font face="Arial" size="5" style="font: 16.0px Arial">"Deserves merit and attention...one of the most <br> important documentaries of recent times."<br> Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice</font></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 16.0px 0.0px"><font face="Arial" size="5" style="font: 16.0px Arial"><b>synopsis:</b></font></p><p align="justify" style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 16.0px 0.0px; text-align: justify"><font face="Arial" size="5" style="font: 16.0px Arial">Gaza Strip pushes the viewer headlong into the tumult of the Israeli-occupied Gaza, examining the lives and views of ordinary Palestinians.</font></p><p align="justify" style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 16.0px 0.0px; text-align: justify"><font face="Arial" size="5" style="font: 16.0px Arial">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.</font></p><p align="justify" style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 16.0px 0.0px; text-align: justify"><font face="Arial" size="5" style="font: 16.0px Arial">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.</font></p><p align="justify" style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 16.0px 0.0px; text-align: justify"><font face="Arial" size="5" style="font: 16.0px Arial">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.</font></p><p align="justify" style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 16.0px 0.0px; text-align: justify"><font face="Arial" size="5" style="font: 16.0px Arial">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.</font></p><p align="justify" style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 16.0px 0.0px; text-align: justify"><font face="Arial" size="5" style="font: 16.0px Arial">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.</font></p><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; text-align: justify; "><font face="Arial" size="5" style="font: 16.0px Arial">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.</font></div></div></body></html>