Voices Across the Wall is unlike anything you’ll ever see. More revealing than any BBC political commentary, this stunning piece gives a balanced and evocative picture of the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli struggle.  The haunting piano soundtrack will reverberate the thoughts and images depicted in the film through you long after its end. It feels like we are there with the director…

Ever since the illegal occupation of Palestine by Israelis in 1967, the media has bombarded us with images of the horrible and bloodthirsty battle. Knowing that no cameras are permitted there, one wonders whether the picture presented to us through the media is the truth. Is there even any truth, and if so, whose is it? It’s not as though we really have much of a choice. Until now.

Using footage shot secretly on location, one-on-one interviews, still photography and scenes from family homes, Sam Liebmann presents us with the opportunity to make up our own minds about the conflict. Occasionally we see the interviewer’s hands, as he shows his passport to various border guards. But his voice is what dominates. He is asking simple questions, seeking an explanation about a sticker on the window of a house that proclaims: ‘No Arabs, no terror’.

At the beginning of the film we are on firm ground: we are taken to Hebron and ‘introduced’ to the leader of the Jewish National Front – a well-educated man, he calmly explains that he believes all Palestinians should be removed to places where Arabs belong. He tells us that the former Palestine is land bestowed upon the Israeli Jews by God, that they have a right to it, and their actions are completely justified in trying to take it back from the Palestinians. A local tour guide agrees, saying the Palestinians have an array of different Muslim countries to go to, but the Israeli Jews have only one, therefore they should own that land. For most of us, this talk provokes anger and frustration, especially when hearing news reports about how many hundreds of Palestinians were killed by Israelis sitting comfortably on the other side. It seems a simple case of ‘goodies versus baddies’. As Voices soon shows us, it’s not that straightforward.

A group of Israelis are helping build a fence at the house of a Palestinian, to add protection against nearby Israeli settlers. According to one of the Israeli helpers, these people are ‘fundamentalists’, interpreting the bible literally, believing they are ‘the true children of Abraham’, who settled in the area, according to the Bible. Muslims apparently also regard themselves children of Israel. An Israeli woman, who lives close to the Lebanese border, tells us a story about her mother, the sole family survivor, escaping the gas chambers. The woman herself lost her husband and children to a gun attack by the Lebanese group in the late 70s. Her husband’s dream of creating a village where Jews and Arabs lived together in harmony was never realised.

More members of the Palestinian contingent are introduced, and we meet a man whose son was shot when he threw stones at a passing Israeli jeep. This father is clearly an intelligent man, yet he declares his son a martyr; it seems this helps him deal with his grief. Another man, whose son was a suicide bomber, killing himself and three others, says that his son wanted to take revenge on the Israelis for killing his friends. To these people, in this most desperate situation, self-sacrifice is worth killing a few of the enemy. This man tells us that, when Israeli soldiers were gunning down Palestinians without any explanation, everyone, old and young, was willing to fight in any way necessary, and suicide was not ruled out.

Finally, we meet Shamekh, a young son of a Muslim Palestinian refugee family from Jerusalem, university music graduate and volunteer ambulance driver. This exceptional young man is without question a diamond in the rough, and the last piece of the film’s puzzle. He is taken aback when asked whether he’d get involved with the war, using guns and blowing people up. ‘Why would I do that?’ he asks, astonished. He knows there is a better way, and as we sit, waiting to hear the next articulate sentence fall from his lips, he blushes and announces that he feels ashamed. Outside, a celebration is taking place, to remember a number of recently killed young martyrs. Guns are being shot into the air, drowning out his words, and he smiles and waits patiently for them to stop, explaining what is going on. Shamekh tells us that the war is not just with the Israelis, there are fights going on between Palestinians all the time. When asked about his plans for the future, he laughs. “What plans?” he scoffs. “Our dreams are like smoke blowing in the wind.”

If you only see one documentary on the subject at this year’s Festival, this brilliant offering is the one to see. Liebmann’s documentary is a thought-provoking piece, which presents us with an array of different views on the conflict, first hand experiences from those in the thick of it, and the rare footage used gives a great insight into just how things are in this ancient, war-ravaged, non-country.

Katharina Chase
London-based Australian writer, linguist and social historian

To read our interview with director Sam Liebmann, click here.

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In 1977, on her way back home from school, a 13-year-old Japanese girl, Megumi, was abducted by the North Korean spies. Mirjam van Veelen’s film of the same title moves in-between the genre of documentary and drama. The film can be seen as an emotional testament to the experience of loss and love, as well as a political claim about the right to life perceived as the right to be free to imagine a future.

Megumi is a personal tragedy yet deeply political since it ends with a tension between two nations. It is an intimate journey of loss, recovery and hope, always already ‘written’ within the political field of international conflicts and diplomacy.

Starting as ‘a film within a film’ event, the camera becomes the eye that records historical facts, the mute interlocutor, the listener that encourages the family and the teacher to narrate, repeat and thus re-produce this story of loss and hope. The way Megumi is shot makes the viewer feels like he/she goes through a mourning process and re-appropriation of the loss of the beloved the same way as her family did.  Re-visiting the real location where abduction took place, following an imaginary path of Megumi’s painful journey, watching political facts and actions that have surrounded this event in the last 30 years, the spectator cannot but be enmeshed into the experiencing of loss: of the beloved, of innocence, of childhood and of future.

Drawing on all sorts of different material – historical footage, photos, personal narratives – this film runs as a recreation of a strange human story, full of twists, which with its intriguing and compelling narration blurs any clear distinctions between fiction and reality, the ordinary and the extraordinary. Megumi invites the spectator to encounter and accept the unexpected by sympathising with the uncanny story of an ordinary banker and his wife, who find themselves caught up in a life they could never have imagined, nor have they chosen. In other words, the film’s narrative engages with the tensions between the individuals and their fate, bringing into the fore the struggling that takes place between the individual and society.

Moving in between different scenarios of what could have happened to Megumi for the last 30 years (the Korean authorities claim she committed suicide, while the family prefers the version that Megumi got married and has a family), this film becomes an exploration of the mystery of life itself, as an ongoing story of hope, belief and love. The use of mediated images of landscape (e.g. the sea, the forest) opens up and binds tightly the subjective experience of an individual life to the world.

Far from being a dark tale about trauma, this documentary re-affirms life as being primarily about hope and faith for the future. Megumi is not absent but fully present in this story: an elusive figure that prays over an ideal future:

“…in my ideal of the future I hope to bind together my talents, my dreams and reality” state Megumi’s  words at the beginning of the film…

Dr Chrysanthi Nigianni
Visiting Lecturer in Sociology, University of East London

To read our interview with director Mirjan van Veelen, click here.

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Set in 2002 in Rutba, Maesmak is a poetic documentary that portrays a road trip to Baghdad, a go-to-death journey experienced by a Greek traveller, an English doctor and an Iraqi story-teller. All this happens just a few weeks before the invasion of Iraq.

Far from claiming to speak on behalf of people’s experience, this documentary respects the distance between the observer (the travellers) and the observed (the Iraqis). The film’s images are in a dialogue with the travellers’ discourses, but are not subsumed by them. They delineate psychological journeys of people who feel their forthcoming death, see the inevitable, negotiate what cannot be bargained. Constituting a map of emotional process of dying on both an individual and collective level, the film keeps posing the persistent question: “maesmak?” meaning “what is your name?”

Georges Salameh made a film about remembrance of what is already forgotten, what is already erased “from the books of creation, where the name and the date of birth is not there.” He builds up a story where the voice-over splits in three different voices (of the traveller, the doctor and the story-teller), the images succeed each other outside any rational sequencing and the irrationality of death and war is what binds and holds these images together. Salameh thus manages to speak about the unspeakable: death. He gives us a testimony of what precedes death and of the death’s effects developed in its shadow. As the doctor’s voice informs us, encountering death always entails a passing through stages of anger-denial-bargaining-depression before accepting the inevitable.

The film’s images run as ruins and fragments of a pre-war world that moves in-between a black-and-white and at times colourful reality, while the music reproduces a certain sense of angst about the coming event of war and death. At times images become scratched by psychological traces, blurred by memory, or clear like mirrors that reflect and accept the forthcoming event.

The film can be experienced as one-way street: what the Greek traveller wishes to do “…leaving from the same road by which I entered Iraq” is simply not possible. The road is no longer the same and the traveller himself has changed. The image cannot be forgotten, cannot be exorcised. Maesmak ends with close ups of children’s faces – shots that compel the spectator to remember how it is to smile after giving up hope and compromising with death; how it is to have a face that owns nothing but an innocent smile.

Maesmak? What is your name?

“Let us meet at the end of the day and let’s see if the books of creation have my name and date of birth”(an Iraqi child).

Knowing his coming erasure (his state of no-name, no-body) the only thing the child possesses is his capacity to smile: a living proof of his humanity before he vanishes into a total of all numbers of war victims.

After this screening the spectator cannot but remember ‘Maesmak’ as the name that will have been forgotten, since the film reminds him/her of the ethical ‘duty’ to pay homage to this imposed oblivion of the erasure of singular lives in wartimes. A remembering that takes place not through the lines of a written history, but though the visual forces of Maesmak.

Dr Chrysanthi Nigianni
Visiting Lecturer in Sociology, University of East London

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