Rating: A
An intensely moving doco about the Palestinian struggle, but also much more than that.
When the film begins by interviewing the most vocal members of a pro-Israel protest, you know it isn’t going to pull any punches. It tackles all the difficult issues head-first, with the thesis that the Holocaust is now being repeated by the state of Israel against Palestinian civilians. The archival footage of both make for very raw viewing.
The format and genre of the film are difficult to pin down. Four main interviewees, or characters, Noam Chomsky, Robert Fisk, Norman Finkelstein, and Sara Roy, talk about their upbringings (some within a Zionist community), and how they were disenfranchised and came to share the Palestinian cause. This provides a narrative of sorts, but then there are interludes of lasting landscape shots showing bombed-out chaos, close-ups of the dissident art that sprawls over Israel’s gigantic concrete walls, and animated vignettes which director Sarah Cordery uses creatively to give us more perspective on these four than mere faces and words can provide. Together with a timeline that jumps back and forth throughout the last hundred years, it resembles more a notebook (hence the title) than a cohesive beginning-middle-end story, and all of this moves the film from the documentary genre into something else entirely; something sort of bent-sideways, twisted, clutching and probing into your soul.
The film was made over ten years, which one can definitely feel in the two and a half hour cut (an alternate cut was shown at the NZ International Film Festival in 2014), which takes its time to linger on the human aspects of the story, sacrificing breadth for a narrower depth. As such, Cordery appropriately claims that it is “a film” about Palestine, rather than “the film”. No doubt some will accuse her of making “a propaganda film”, but I suspect she will not mind.
If you are one of those undergrads who hears about Israel and Palestine in the news and ignores it because you don’t know anything about it you’re looking to watch something light hearted, it would definitely behoove you to watch this one. It’s not exactly a cheery Saturday night flick, but it’s important, and it won’t be easily forgotten.