When Emad Burnat and his wife had a new son, this poor Palestinian farm labourer decided to buy a video camera. In this he was like so many proud parents around the world.
one of the most compelling documentaries yet seen on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
It’s just that in this case, their village of Bil’in on the West Bank near the border with Israel had been under Israeli occupation since the 1967 Yom Kippur war, and clashes between the occupying army and the locals had been a constant in his life since the second Intifada erupted in the year 2000.
Burnat’s instincts told him that when there was trouble, he should go outside and film it, and trouble indeed there was. That instinct would lead him and his Israeli co-directing partner Guy Davidi to make one of the most compelling documentaries yet seen on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The title refers to the five cameras broken – usually by tear-gas grenades or bullets – as Burnat filmed clashes between the Israeli security forces and local protestors over a period of several years.
This deservedly Oscar-nominated documentary’s lack of attempted objectivity or balance is in fact a crucial part of its strength. The story here connects on an emotional level because it’s a highly personal one – a well-edited video diary logged over an extended period. If there is no attempt to quote the Israeli side of the story, neither is there any commentary from official Palestinian political spokesmen.
Israel’s occupation and settlement-building on the West Bank is frequently covered on news bulletins and current affairs shows, of course, but without their audiences ever really understanding what it feels like to live under such conditions.
Here, however, we watch the daily reality of a man, a family, and a community, as they cope with soldiers parading through their village in armoured cars, rapping on doors and demanding entry, burning olive trees that used to provide an income, and firing tear gas canisters and even live rounds at peacefully protesting locals at alarmingly close range.
A critical fact here is the decision by the Israelis to construct settlements near Bil’lin, followed by a fortified wire fence through the villagers’ farmland to block the movement of suicide bombers or protestors. The questionable legality of the Israeli venture provides a repeated narrative backdrop as Palestinian campaigners challenge these moves in the law courts.
The legal battle leads to a major, albeit temporary success near the end of the film, but it’s not given much screen-time because Burnat is a peasant, not a lawyer, and he’s only really interested in documenting the occupation as he sees it on the ground.
Serious injury and death are no strangers to these regular clashes. Most of the demonstrations in which Burnat and his friends take part are peaceful, but repeatedly the Israeli military take violent action to break them up. In one incident, Burnat’s filming equipment possibly saves his life when his camera stops a live bullet. That Palestinians can also resort to violence is also made clear in two scenes where Israeli armoured cars are ferociously pelted with stones by local youths.
The more the Israelis try to stamp out dissent, the more ferocious the locals’ resistance becomes, and the resistance spreads to other villages (a vital lesson the occupiers appear not have learned from Pontecorvo’s 1966 anti-colonial classic, The Battle of Algiers). The injunction to 'stop filming!" becomes a frequent cry, leading the viewer to wonder why, if the soldiers are doing nothing wrong, they are so worried about being captured on film?
If the documentary has a flaw, it is that at the odd important juncture it is so vague that it invites suspicions the filmmakers are being parsimonious with the truth. When Burnat’s truck collides with the Israeli barrier, he skips over how this happened (was he or the driver trying to tear it down?), even though he ends up in an Israeli hospital with injuries that, as he observes, would probably have killed him had he been taken to a Palestinian hospital.
Also unexplained is how this humble peasant can afford to buy what seem to be a string of increasingly expensive and sophisticated cameras, the last one looking like a professional news camera. If the PLO or sympathetic foreigners provided these, there’s surely no shame in that.
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