MovieChat Forums > Five Broken Cameras Discussion > About the film

About the film

posted 12 years ago by Al_Hambra
18 replies | jump to latest

5 Broken Cameras opens with an introduction to the titular recording devices, each lined up on a table to represent a chapter in cameraman Emad Burnat’s amazing documentation of a microcosm of the Palestinean/Israeli conflict. The first camera was purchased for the birth of Gibreel, one of his sons, in 2005. This was the same time that Bil’in, his hometown just west of Ramallah in the West Bank, saw Israeli bulldozers tear up the town’s olive trees to make way for a wall that was to surround an advancing Jewish settlement. Outraged, the town peacefully protested and became engaged is a six-year resistance. As the situation intensifies, the cameras are damaged beyond repair and systematically replaced as Burnat captures the personalities and passions involved in the conflict. While the resistance trudges on, Gibreel grows from an infant into an aware young boy, becoming part of the struggle. He’ s a sobering reminder that children who are raised in conflict only understand a simplified black-and-white perspective on war that codifies their future prejudices. Burnat and co-director Guy Davidi have taken a single, specific context, and illuminated the universally harrowing effects that any conflict brings to the lives of its participants.

[–] PoppyTransfusion 12 years ago

Nice review. I'm hoping to see the film when it opens in the UK soon.

Why problem make? When you no problem have, you don't want to make ...

[–] koreshek 12 years ago

Coming from self-hating Jew, that Guy guy, no thanks. Why not to make a documentary on how for 65 years the Muslims make the lives of other Muslims even more depressing and devastating by inability to accept the state of Israel.
I spit on that type of documentaries - honest they aren't.

[–] PierrotdeParis 12 years ago

@koreshek
Well Guy Davidi lived all his life in Israel and is teaching cinema in Israel, so I doubt he is "a self-hating jew", otherwise he would have gone elsewhere. By the way this 'insult' applies to all the jews who are critical against Israel's policy, all. Like if "a self-loving jew" couldn't be critical about the excesses of Israel.
And why speaking about what happens in muslim countries when this documentary is about nonviolent resistance to the actions of the Israeli army?
Did you even see it?

[–] PoppyTransfusion 12 years ago

By the way this 'insult' applies to all the jews who are critical against Israel's policy, all. Like if "a self-loving jew" couldn't be critical about the excesses of Israel.

Exactly! It seems to be a type of 'newspeak'; critical of Israel = anti-semite and if the critic is Jewish = self hating Jew.

I've read quite a few reviews of the film now and all praise the film whilst noting that it is not objective and impartial and neither does it claim to be. It is one man's document; a project that has absorbed him since buying a camera for domestic reasons. I can't wait to see it but may have to wait for the DVD (Jan 2013) as I can't make any of the screening dates. But see it I will.

Why problem make? When you no problem have, you don't want to make ...

[–] Old55 11 years ago

This excellent documentary provides an important perspective on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict few people in the United States know much about. At a time when the conflict is escalating, my wish is that this movie would be seen by a lot more people...those with strong opinions and those who just don't know much about what is happening in those lands.

[–] FuzzyWzhe 11 years ago

HAHA.

Every single time anybody produces good evidence of what the conflict is actually about there's always at least 1 response that is:

* The Jewish people are perfect
* The person that presented this data is anti-Semitic if not Jewish or a self hating Jew if Jewis
* Arabs are evil and much worse anyhow

Every time.

If Israel really was in the right, you wouldn't need Habara, or Megaphone, or GIYUS. It wouldn't be necessary.

The longer this goes on the worse it will be when the situation finally normalizes.

[–] horst-kackebart 11 years ago

Try asking for forgiveness as a German mid-twenty year old humanist. Can't we just all try to bury the hatchet? All the conflict really hasn't lead to anything at all except millions of corpses and millions of families in pain over their losses. It's "hug it out or die a miserable death in grief", there won't ever be any satisfaction in vengefulness and unforgivingness.

Ofc it's easy for me to say so as a Westerner who has spent his life in peace and I wouldn't dare to judge anyone for feeling vengeful, but do we really have to go out and promote such a flaw in human nature to the general public? If you cannot get over your hate, at least try to allow everyone else to do so.

edit: 5 % of the voters went out of their own way to rate this movie 1. Fills me with sadness.

[–] FuzzyWzhe 11 years ago

edit: 5 % of the voters went out of their own way to rate this movie 1. Fills me with sadness.

You might want to look up Camera. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_for_Accuracy_in_Middle_East_Rep orting_in_America#CAMERA_campaign_in_Wikipedia
or GIYUS http://www.giyus.org/
and Megaphone http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaphone_desktop_tool
or Hasbara http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_diplomacy_%28Israel%29

You can expect a lot more 1's as time goes on.

What makes me dislike Zionism so much, is the sheer amount of effort that supporters make to misinform the public so they can justify anything.

It reminds me of the tactics of Michael Moore, Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, Keith Olbermann, etc. They are utterly unprincipled and they have no interest in informing you at all. Just pure indoctrination, and you don't need that if you are actually in the right.

Ever hear people say that Palestinians indiscriminately kill and Israel doesn't?

http://www.rememberthesechildren.org/

If that's true, Israel sure targets a lot of children. Spend some time reading through that if you have the stomach for it.

Ever hear about the "1000's of rockets Hamas launches"? Any idea as to how many Israeli's have actually been killed by these?

Officially, it's been 64

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_rocket_attacks_on_Israel#Casu alties.2C_Fatalities_and_rockets_fired

There are 6 million people in Israel, about. There's 24,000 people killed each year by lightning and approximately 7 billion people on the planet.

(24,000/7,000,000,000)*6,000,000 = 20 people. Statistically, about 20 Israelis should be killed by lightning every year. That means you're 4 times more likely to be killed by a lightning strike than a Palestinian rocket if you're an Israeli.

This is the supposed terror of the Palestinians. The Israelis are insane and are intentionally whipped up into a frenzy of continual unrelenting hysteria. Much like the US has been about Arabs. I wonder if that's just a coincidence?

So, if you're just sad about a few people marking this film as a 1, you really haven't dug too deep into the conflict to see how depressed you can be over it. The entire justification for the conflict is built upon lies, misinformation, and propaganda. You'd think that would have ended decades ago, that the people of Western nations aren't capable of being so utterly programmed.

Nope. Not at all. You can really be depressed when you find out that propaganda exists as much today as it did in 1939 Germany and that most people you know, are victims of it, and you probably are as well. If you manage to break your programming, you'll be called a liar, anti-Semitic, and brainwashed and no amount of data you produce, no amount of reasoning, will convince anybody, except a very few.

You can compound your depression by knowing that there's never in history been a nation that could survive in continual conflict with it's neighbors or the people it's occupied. Never in history. Knowing this will show you that, unless this time it's different, Israel and it's 6 million inhabitants are doomed to suffer the same exact fate - and there's nothing you can do to stop it, which in the end, will be a bloodbath.

Sometimes I wonder who is engineering this whole thing. Are they rabid Jewish nationalists, or are they rabid anti-Semites? Maybe they are working together without realizing it, but the end game is the same. Destruction. Israel has had over 60 years to unilaterally declare the borders of the Israeli state, and thereby make a Palestinian state by default - but they just keep building settlements, uprooting Palestinians, and disenfranchising their indigenous non Jewish population while depending on US support continually to make it all happen - all the while expanding.

If you point to the inevitable result of this, well, you must just hate Jewish people. It's always the same result, the occupier isn't just overthrown, they are destroyed unless the occupier commits genocide. In this case, Israel would have to kill about 1 billion Muslims. Good luck with that, Dimona or not.

[–] dirkbuttercup 11 years ago

GREAT post. Thoughtful and fact based.
Thank you.

"Never make a decision when you need to pee"

[–] halosthorns 11 years ago

edit: 5 % of the voters went out of their own way to rate this movie 1. Fills me with sadness.

have a feeling many of these people didn't even bother to watch the movie

[–] 11 years ago

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[–] PoppyTransfusion 11 years ago

Also, and importantly, two of the cameras save Emad's life. It could be argued that all of them afford him some protection as the Israeli soldiers seemed to allow him greater freedom of movement around them than other villagers and were probably wary of injuring him.

I think it was clever to align the story of the cameras with his youngest son's upbringing/development just as he connects each of his preceding three sons' births with significant developments in the Israeli-Palestinian civil war. This latter is the impression I'm left with following the film because anytime the Bil'in villagers wanted to do something it was treated as though an act of war.

I was very sorry about Phil's ('elephant') death. RIP Baseem Abu-Rahman. Also, I wanted to know his brother Abeed's outcome. All I knew was that he spent a year in jail but what after that?

To say a little often is to tell more than to say a great deal.

[–] mollys-lips 11 years ago

SPOILER ALERT
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Eli's death was heartbreaking...even more so because at this point those soldiers, at least some of them, knew what he was about. The protest had been going on for years at that point that they had presumably seen Eli repremand people on his side for throwing rocks. In the end he was killed by a well-armed soldier seperated from the crowd by several yards and two barbed-wire fences. Violence is horrible, no matter where it comes from and both sides in this conflict have behaved badly but it's not hard to see where the violence comes from. The villagers' lands and livlihoods were stolen from them via illegal settlements. They have watched their grandfathers and fathers hauled off to jail and worse...young men ar natually more aggressive and so watching all of that it is understandable, not excusable, where the violence comes from.

[–] 11 years ago

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[–] squiles 11 years ago

First of all you have a GREAT confusion, an Arab can be Cristian, can be jew, can be orthodox or can be muslim. I don't know mr. Davidi, but maybe due of his lastname he is probably a sepharady jew, in other words... an Arab.

The seconth thing it's about portraying arabs as "free speech haters" comparing it with Israel "A lighthouse of Freedom in the world", neither expression are accurate, it's true that a lot of the arab countries, are something like "don't like FoS countries" but if you see "Reporteurs Sans Frontières" anual report you can see some curious things:

http://en.rsf.org/press-freedom-index-2013,1054.html

Israel is in the place #112 (only taking into account '67 borders)... if that is a lighthouse, our ship is already sunking, there are 4 arab countries better than israel in this matter (comoros 51, Mauritania 67, Kuwait 77, Lebanon 101 you were wrong giving it as an example) and ther are some arab countries quite close in this chart to Israel (United AE 114, Algeria 125 antoher wrong example, Libya 131, Jordan 134 and Morocco 136) probably press or Free speech in those last countries are not so good... just like in Israel... and obviously you have the very bad examples of Syria (currently at open war), Yemen, Djibouti that are usualy taken by anti-arabs stereotypers like you.

x) In Israel, there is a STRONG military censorship on the media (for example http://972mag.com/tag/ben-zygier/)
x) In Israel there is forbidden to call for a boycott on settlers products
x) there is a STRONG social pressure on israeli historian that not agree with the "official story" (for example, Ilan Pappe received several death menace AND academic pressures until his moving to UK)
x) there is a STRONG propaganda in schollar books AND academic pressure on scholars historian AND official book burning for "not accurate" (read Nurit Pelled on this issue)
x) In Israeli schools it is forbiden by law to celebrate the Nakba
x) In several cities it is forbiden in public places to have christian simbols (like xmas trees for xmas)
x) NGO are subject of State control to receive foreign funding, and obviously NGO critics to Israel can be demonetized.

but all of this is about "Israeli Freedom of Speech for israeli citizens"... BESIDE THAT... you should consider also "Israeli freedom of speech for non israeli citizens" don't forget that near 5 millions of palestinian lives under Israely occupation. They can shoot you for having a camera, they can evict a radio station, they can bulldoze a radio station, they can arrest you passing a checkpoint without trial, they can impeach notorious people to reach palestine as they control the entrance to the territories, they can retain filming material quiting the territories, they can bomb your building even if you are a foreign press member in gaza.

That's apartheid, two distinct set of laws for two people in the same territory.

Here is a list of 14 Press people killed in Israel (2 of them alleged to be killed by "iron fist" palestinian, and 12 of them by "freespeech angles" israeli)
http://cpj.org/killed/mideast/israel-and-the-occupied-palestinian-territory/

[–] 11 years ago

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[–] rlippman-2 11 years ago

Saying that a Sephardic Jew is really an Arab strikes me as ignorant and discriminatory. Mr. Davidi is in fact Israeli by birth. A true patriot in my eyes.

_______

A wrench to the head changes everything.

[–] 11 years ago

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