BILIN JOURNAL
Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times
Emad Burnat, a farmer and videographer, with his son Gibreel near the wall of separation in the West Bank.
By ETHAN BRONNER
Published: January 22, 2012news and headlines.
BILIN, West Bank — Emad Burnat was born to the land and, like generations of his family in this hilltop West Bank village, he has eked out a modest living from its rocky soil. But six years ago, at the birth of a son, he was given a video camera and turned unexpectedly into the village chronicler.
The New York Times
Bilin has become the center of popular resistance.
There was a great deal to record. Israel was building a separation barrier on village land that included some of his family’s own. The rationale behind it was to stop suicide bombers, but the move confiscated most of the village’s arable land and allowed for the expansion of an enormous Israeli settlement.
Bulldozers uprooted centuries-old olive trees while settlers drove up with furniture and mobile homes. Villagers stood in the way; soldiers arrested them. Mr. Burnat was there, day in, day out, filming with his new camera.
Now, working with an Israeli filmmaker, Guy Davidi, Mr. Burnat has taken his years of video and turned them into a compelling personal tale. The film, “Five Broken Cameras,” won two awards in November at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, including the Audience Award, and is one of about a dozen films competing at Sundance this week in the World Documentary category.
As Bilin became the center for Palestinian popular resistance — weekly demonstrations joined by Israeli and foreign activists, and a partial Supreme Court victory forcing the barrier to be moved and some land returned — Mr. Burnat’s images became crucial. They were used not only by journalists but by those fighting charges in Israeli military courts. Accusations of assault were sometimes countered with a common refrain: let’s go to Emad’s videotape.
The new documentary intersperses scenes of villagers fighting the barrier with Mr. Burnat’s son Gibreel’s first words (“cartridge,” “army”), undercover Israeli agents taking away friends and relatives, and Mr. Burnat’s wife, Soraya, begging him to turn his attention away from politics and be with his family. Over six years, Mr. Burnat went through five cameras, each broken in the course of filming — among other things, by soldiers’ bullets and an angry settler. At the start of the film, Mr. Burnat lines up the cameras on a table. They form the movie’s chapters and create a motif for the unfolding drama — the power of bearing witness. Mr. Burnat never puts his camera down and it drives his opponents mad.
“Tell him if he keeps filming I will break his bones!” a settler declares to a soldier. Mr. Burnat keeps filming. The settler approaches him and, as the camera rolls, throws it to the ground, breaking it. The screen goes blank.
“When I film, I feel like the camera protects me,” Mr. Burnat says in his soft-voiced narration of the movie, making a point familiar to all journalists. “But it is an illusion.”
In one scene, soldiers come to Mr. Burnat’s house (“Now it’s my turn,” he says into the camera) to arrest him on charges of throwing stones and assaulting a soldier — charges he denied and of which he was later exonerated, according to an army spokesman. He films the soldiers’ entry into his house and their surreal assertion that he must turn off his camera because he is in a “closed military area.” “I am in my own home,” he replies. He spends three weeks in prison and six weeks under house arrest. It takes three years for the case to be dismissed.
A subtheme of the film is the activism of Mr. Burnat’s two close friends, Adeeb and Bassem Abu Rahma, who were cousins. Bassem was nicknamed “Phil,” the Arabic word for elephant. Both were playful, big-hearted guys at the front of the demonstrations. Phil was killed at a demonstration in 2009, and Mr. Burnat originally thought of making the movie about him.
But Mr. Davidi and an Israeli organization called Greenhouse, which pairs regional filmmakers with European mentors and is financed by the European Union, persuaded Mr. Burnat to place himself at the center of his story. It was a crucial move that gave the film its power and intimacy. But it did not come naturally.
“It was a very difficult decision to make such a personal film,” Mr. Burnat, 40, said as he sat in the garden of his home. Gibreel, now 6, and his older sons were wandering in and out, and the high-rises of the Modiin Illit settlement could be seen in the distance. “I was uncomfortable about showing footage of my wife. This may be normal in Europe, but here in Palestine you have to answer many questions. I have so far avoided showing the film here.”
Mr. Davidi, the 33-year-old Israeli co-director, first came to Bilin in 2005 to shoot a documentary on Palestinian workers who take construction jobs in the settlement, and he met Mr. Burnat then. “We wanted our film to be an understatement, not to be provocative or combative,” Mr. Davidi said.
