Budrus

[Al-khiyal]

[Al-khiyal]

Planting peace

September 9, 2010 -- The timing for the Montreal screening of Budrus feels strange. Just last week, the Obama Administration tried to jump start Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, with everyone suggesting the talks would come to nothing. Where this vicious regional conflict is concerned, conventional thinking has it, there is no room for hope. Thus this makes the feature-length documentary Budrus that much more refreshing and astonishing. The film introduces us to the population of a small Palestinian village who, as a result of the building of the security fence, will lose their main source of economic revenue: their olive trees. We see Israeli forces moving into the fields with bulldozers and unearthing the trees—an act that will devastate their economy.

But what struck director Julia Bacha and producer Ronit Avni was the incredible response of the Palestinians in Budrus. The community leaders insisted they would fight to have the trees replanted, but would do so entirely non-violently. The film becomes intensely moving when a group of Israeli activists arrive to support them in non-violent protest; one Palestinian woman says “The only Israelis I’d ever met before were wearing military uniforms.” The Montreal-born Avni says the inspiration for Budrus came when she was touring with her last film about the Middle East, the award-winning Encounter Point. “During discussions, audiences would ask us, ‘Where is the Palestinian Gandhi?’ They would suggest that if only Palestinians embraced non-violence, then there would be peace. We knew the situation was much more complicated than that.”

Avni and Bacha decided they wanted to find a story that showed Palestinians and Israelis working together towards peace through entirely non-violent means. “All of our research kept leading us back to Budrus,” she recalls. “And most Israelis and Palestinians did not know the story of this village.” Avni, who studied theatre at Dawson College before going to New York to study political science at Vassar College, says educators often have difficulty teaching about conflict in the Middle East. “There was often a disconnect between what I was studying and the reality. Sometimes, the educator failed to reflect the complexity of the issues.” One of the main points with Budrus was, “we didn’t want to dehumanize anyone. But at the same time, we didn’t want to shy away from any of the issues involved.”

The result is a remarkably complex film, featuring interviews with members of the Israeli military, Palestinian farmers and activists, and Israeli activists. (In fact, I reckon it’ll be a sure thing that Budrus will get, at very least, an Oscar nomination in the best-doc category.) “It was very important for us that we respected the subjects, even if the things they were discussing were difficult or controversial.” While meetings between politicians in Washington might seem a start, Avni argues that “this conflict is too vast and complex for politicians to solve on their own. Top-down models are too fragile. It won’t work. It’s critical that ordinary people participate.”

[Al-khiyal]

Budrus

This thought-provoking piece from documentary-maker Julia Bacha is about the village of Budrus, on the Palestinian West Bank. It found itself in a frightening territorial stranglehold when the Israeli government began to build its anti-terrorist "barrier" wall in 2003 to guard against suicide-bomber incursions. The villagers' livelihood depended utterly on the olive trees which were brutally uprooted by the army bulldozers to make way for the wall, whose route snaked around in such a way as to cut off communities from each other and make their living all but impossible. Former Fatah activist Ayed Morrar organises an avowedly non-violent resistance with the help of sympathetic Israeli liberals and international observer-activists. The "non-violence" of course comes under strain when the IDF's irresistible force comes into contact with the protesters' immovable object. What is so arresting about Bacha's film is that it shows something about the Israeli wall that I hadn't grasped. It doesn't just simply separate the Israelis from the Palestinians, but wanders on to the Palestinian territory, meandering and looping around: the idea is not merely to stop movement into Israel but covertly to impose paralysis within the Palestinian zone itself. Eventually, the Israeli government backs down and settles for a simple partition line that "frees" Budrus. Bacha leaves it to us to decide if this is a great victory for the Palestinians or a cunning way of getting them to accept the wall in principle. This involving film is an eye-opener.