Any major film addressing the Israel-Palestine conflict can expect to court a measure of controversy, but American artist and filmmaker Julian Schnabel's intervention is unlikely to cause much consternation among a mainstream cinema audience. Speaking at the premiere of his latest film, Miral, at the Venice Film Festival, he proclaimed that "coming from my background, as an American Jewish person whose mother was president of Hadassah [the Women's Zionist Organization of America] in 1948, I figured I was a pretty good person to try to tell the story of the other side." By attempting to exorcise his personal demons, Schnabel has finally brought Palestine to Hollywood. However, with Miral he has unfortunately created a rather drab, and at times infuriating, bourgeois melodrama spanning over forty years of history from the birth of the Israeli state to the failed negotiation at Oslo.
Omar El-Khairy is a playwright and PhD candidate in political sociology at LSE. He resides in the gutters of the English language.
Full Article
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11638.shtml
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Mondoweiss: Will Miral be this generation’s Exodus?
by Adam Horowitz
Today, I saw Julian Schnabel's new film Miral. It won't be arriving in theaters in the US until next March, so it will be awhile until we see what effect it has, but my initial impression was amazement at what I was watching. Here was a film following many of the conventions of a traditional Hollywood film, but this time it was telling the Palestinian liberation story (which might explain why it was not produced in Hollywood and instead was a French/Israeli/Italian/Indian co-production).
The film, based on Rula Jebreal's semi-autobiographical novel of the same name, takes us from the Nakba, and children orphaned during the Deir Yassin massacre, through the first Intifada to the signing of the Oslo Accords. I know there will be criticisms, and I have a few that I'll share later, but right now I am struck by the emotional impact of the film. You follow the lead character through checkpoints, refugee camps, home demolitions, interrogations, humiliations and protests. After that it is impossible to not understand, and feel, the Palestinian call for justice.
Full Article
http://mondoweiss.net/2010/11/will-miral-be-this-generations-exodus.html
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