Israeli Settlement Crisis Home Videos

Emad Burnat stands looking at a row of cameras laid out on a steel table in his house. Two have been bashed in, another two riddled with bullets, and the last rendered useless by a thorough soaking of noxious gas from Israeli grenades. Emad originally set out to use these cameras to film the birth of his fourth son, but over the last six years they’ve become tools for documenting the spread of Israeli settlers and their eventual takeover of his West Bank village. Emad’s fittingly titled film, 5 Broken Cameras, was cut together from over 500 hours of footage. It’s part of the New Directors/New Films festival that begins this week at Lincoln Center and MoMA.

VICE worked with Emad in 2007 when we shot Israel vs. Palestine: Against the Wall. We were in need of a cameraman that could take over for our Israeli shooter once the crew crossed into the West Bank. Even in Bil’in, his tiny village several miles from the border, Emad was known as “the man with the movie camera.” And, indeed, 5 Broken Cameras could only be made if the camera had always been rolling. Unlike virtually all the coverage about the Israel-Palestine entanglement, 5 Broken Cameras spares the viewer the plodding history of politics and distills the conflict down to a single perspective–a personal account of the Israeli settlement crisis by way of home videos.

Emad introduces his children by naming the era Palestine was in at the time of each child’s birth. His first was born into the relative calm afforded by the Oslo Peace Accord. The second was born during the Second Intifada. Gibreel, his newborn, was born as the Israeli separation barrier began construction. The barrier, which was constructed 35 miles into West Bank territory (as designated by the international Green line), envelopes 50 percent of Bil’in’s cultivated land. To Emad, this is the confiscation of his home. The village reacts with a volley of nonviolent demonstrations, provoking the Israeli army more with each attempt to dismantle the barrier.

Throughout this stretch of events, Guy Davidi, an Israeli filmmaker who had arrived with the general press, noticed that Emad was the only Bil’in villager with a camera, and that he always had it rolling at exactly the right moment. Guy asked to watch some of his footage.

“I was watching this image of an old man climbing an army jeep to keep it from taking someone away,” Guy says. “And I asked Emad, ‘Who is this guy?‘ And he said, ‘That’s my father.’” Guy’s recalling a scene in which Emad’s father, easily over 65 years old, clambers atop an Israeli Humvee to keep it from carting off his son. “So at that moment I think I realized that there are really important images in the five, six years of footage that was shot.” This film is filled with haunting scenes like this: Three-year-old Gilbreen choking on tear gas leaking through the car doors as the family flees from a demonstration gone awry; Emad waking up to his field of olive trees set aflame; soldiers on a night raid to arrest the village’s children.

The severity of these clips supersede the need for sober, accurate politics. When you see three women blocking the door from a soldier and screaming “there are no children here!” the complexities of the political situation are stripped away to the basic motivations of a family. 5 Broken Cameras, for better or worse, operates within this bubble, boiling down the situation to a small village getting poleaxed by a big army. The Palestinians cycle through their arsenal of creatively non-violent actions and the Israelis respond by sending out a horde of troops. The action-reaction cycle is repeated so often that it becomes a kind of dark joke.

As Emad’s brothers are all either arrested or shot (one of which is shot point-blank in the leg on a whim by an Israeli soldier), his friends blinded by tear gas or killed, and himself put on house arrest (not in his own home, mind you, because that was deemed part of a Closed Military Zone by Israel), you marvel at the man’s grip on his camera. His wife implores him to give it up or face another stint of jail time. But it’s the way he’ll heal this land, he says. “Healing is a victim’s sole obligation. By healing, you resist oppression.”

We had the chance to sample a bunch of the other films the Lincoln Film Society has selected for this year’s New Directors/New Films, the demented younger sibling to the more stately New York Film Festival. Like always, they’re an eclectic and sometimes punishingly eccentric batch of work from new names in filmmaking. Gems like 5 Broken Cameras are peppered generously through the program, with notables including Gimme the Loot, Crulic, and Oslo August 31st. 

New Directors/New Films is presented by The Film Society of Lincoln Center and MoMA (tickets at filmlinc.com). Five Broken Cameras is screening Mon 3/26 at 6 PM and Tues 3/27 at 8:30 PM.