Our struggle is not just about land or borders; it is about the heart and soul of a people who refuse to be forgotten.
~Samih al-Qasim
This really happened. The most grotesque thing you could imagine (until the next thing, at least). This is indeed the TRUTH that Donald Trump posted this morning. He wasn't hacked, and it wasn't a hoax. In what more auspicious possible circumstance could I return to write the first post on this blog since I left things off nearly a year ago?
A post about some of the actors and directors who will come into focus when I get to the heart of this matter......
Purim falls on the 14th day of the Jewish month of Adar. It fell in late February in the year that I stayed in Jerusalem. There was a big fancy dress party, and then the day after was seemingly a fairly quiet one until my friend from down the corridor came to ask me if I'd heard the news about what had happened in Hebron.
Iranian cinema is one of the most remarkable phenomena in the Modern World. I'm in danger here of making this blog into something which it definitely is not trying to be, but let's pretend for a few minutes that this is a film blog...... If we're going to go there, it's a given that Iranian cinema was deeply influenced by Italian neorealism in the 1960s, and then something strange happened. While the rest of the world moved on and tried out new cinematic fads and trends, this intentionally naive realistic style became the living breathing identity of Iranian cinema...
Ziad Doueiri's 1998 film 'West Beirut' was quite the epiphany for me. Having for many years mentally pictured Beirut as a giant urban mantrap, with perfectly good reason given all the news that we were fed about the place throughout the 1980s, it was virtually impossible to visualise the lives of ordinary Lebanese people in the midst of the madness that engulfed them for fifteen years.
The format here is very simple. I'm going to discuss three Israeli films about the invasion and occupation of Lebanon. These three films were actually made remarkably close to each other in time. The chronology of the films' production is in reverse order of the moments in history that they describe. Before looking at the first film, a little historical background. I have little intention here of justifying or decrying anything. The only intention in this first section is to answer the question of why Israel...