The Boston Palestine Film Festival runs online from October 13 through October 22. The live component has been postponed due to the tragic current events in Palestine and Israel. Click here for the schedule and ticket info, and watch the site for Joshua Polanski’s continuing coverage.
THE LAW AND THE PROPHETS (2022) dir. Joshua Vis
Most documentaries at the Boston Palestine Film Festival, at least since I first began covering it last year, are made primarily with a Palestinian audience in mind. This isn’t always the case (sometimes to the detriment of the films), but it’s the norm, and that makes sense: it’s the Boston Palestine Film Festival, after all. It’s in this context that The Law and the Prophets is the best documentary I’ve seen that situates the current status of Palestinians in the historical contexts that created and sustain the system of their Occupation.
For a newcomer to the conflict between Palestine and Israel, this is the first documentary I would recommend.
Joshua Vis knows something about both the land that the Palestinians inhabit and prophets: he has a Ph.D. in the Hebrew Bible and has a strong background in the archaeology of ancient Israel. Other than a brief monologue that wraps up the documentary, his biblical background does more to inform his sense of justice than it does lead to theological triads or anything distasteful. Unless you’re a nerd like me (with a graduate-level background in similar fields as Vis), you might not even pick up on how his personal expertise informs his virtually journalistic history of the Palestinian situation today.
“This is a fact,” Vis, who identifies as an “activist” in his bottom third, states in his historical summary, accompanied by photos and B-roll footage from the Nakba, about the forced expulsion of Palestinians from the land. He stops short, as far as I can recall, from using the term “ethnic cleansing,” but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t present the proof; one of his interview subjects speaks of the “ongoing Nakba.” But in total, he’s more interested in the conditions of Palestinians today (as in, before the recent war and the collective punishment of Gaza) than the history of the conflict.
The documentary is at its most indispensable in its laying plain of the systems and bureaucracies of occupation. The weaponization of time is particularly insidious. One of the interview subjects, a multi-ethnic man from Youngstown, Ohio who married a Palestinian woman, waited 16 years to hear back about his residency status from the Israeli army. Earlier in the film, legal experts explain Israel’s legal rationale for the Occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem in the 4th Geneva Convention—and how those very conditions for occupation, especially its temporary nature, are no longer met by the Israeli occupiers. Vis also explains with precision the average night raid and interrogation—acts of state violence so maggoty it should be criminal for there to be averages.
The most fascinating portion of The Law and the Prophets is its use of dissenting and now repentant Israeli voices to tell the story of Palestinian oppression. (This is not to say Palestinian voices are suppressed.) One former IDF soldier even talks about seeing himself as “the villain.” I suppose it’s a more persuasive rhetorical decision, one with the appearance of a more neutral bias. It also makes it an easy film to recommend to those sympathetic to the state of Israel, Zionists, and North American conservatives.
This is not a documentary about the crushing weight of Occupation, apartheid, and oppression; there are other documentaries that do this, including ones at this year’s festival. This is the story of how Israel occupies the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. For that purpose alone, The Law and the Prophets is required viewing for anyone who considers themselves uneducated about the Palestine-Israel conflict.
SARURA: THE FUTURE IS AN UNKNOWN PLACE (2023) dir. Nicola Zabelli
Sarura: The Future Is An Unknown Place is a very different type of documentary than The Law and the Prophets. A sequel to Nicola Zabelli’s 2011 documentary Tomorrow’s Land, Sarura spotlights the non-violent resistance movement called the Youth of Sumud centered in the West Bank village of At-Tuwani. They prefer the armament of video cameras to firearms, planting gardens to slow down settlers as opposed to throwing rocks.
I haven’t seen the first film, but Zabelli reuses archival footage that works like a timelapse of the Israeli settlement of the West Bank. “You did this interview 10 years ago, [on land that] we can’t go to anymore,” one of the Palestinians reports back to Zabelli in the present. The land changes over time—and the two documentaries, of the same place and with many of the same people, testify to the encroachment and land poaching by the settlers. This is a first-person record of occupation.
The Youth of Sumud teach non-violence in camps in the caves of Sarura. One important tactic for the shepherds is that they must constantly patrol and tend to their land, never slacking. If they neglect part of their land, it will cease to be their land. Despite the lack of any material progress and growing tautness, this is an optimistic film about an oppressed people who stubbornly refuse to be psychologically downtrodden.
Sarura is interesting as an ethnographic sampling, made by someone the film’s subjects seem to trust and respect. I’m not sure it’s essential viewing to better understand Palestine and the people of the West Bank; there are more successful and widespread non-resistance movements than this one, whose stories may hold more ethical value and deserve a stronger platform. Regardless, Zabelli’s second documentary on the people of At-Tuwani is at least an interesting footnote about this tradition of Palestinian non-violent resistance to military occupation.
Sarura: The Future Is An Unknown Place
2023
dir. Nicola Zabelli
80 min.
The Law and the Prophets
2022
dir. Joshua Vis
105 min.
