“Well, I am an Oscar nominee. But more to the point, my film, 5 Broken Cameras -- which chronicles my village Bil'in's nonviolent struggle to resist Israeli occupation -- is about precisely the kind of humiliation my family and I experienced at Los Angeles International Airport. The only difference is that the victims where I come from number in the millions, and our stories have become so routine that what happened to my family and me yesterday pales by comparison. That's because, on any given day, there are more than 500 Israeli checkpoints, roadblocks, and other obstacles to movement throughout the West Bank -- an area less than 2 percent the size of California on which some 2.5 million Palestinians live under a ubiquitous system of repression.”
—Emad Burnat, director of the Oscar-nominated documentary 5 Broken Cameras on his detainment at LAX last Tuesday. The doc didn’t win, but you can watch it on Netflix - it’s incredible.
Palestinian Oscar Nominee Detained at LA Airport
This is Emad Burnat, the Palestinian filmmaker nominated for an Oscar for his doco 5 Broken Cameras, and his family. They made it to Oscar night, but not before being detained at Los Angeles International Airport, because Immigration Officers found it hard to believe a Palestinian could be an Oscar nominee (even after Burnat presented them with the official Oscars invitation). Michael Moore came to his help, and Burnat told him: ‘It’s nothing I’m not already used to. When you live under occupation, with no rights, this is a daily occurrence.’ Check out Moore’s series of tweets about this.
Oscar-nominated Palestinian director detained at LAX
english.al-akhbar.com
Palestinian director of Oscar-nominated “5 Broken Cameras” Emad Burnat was detained at Los Angeles airport and threatened with deportation Wednesday, the filmmaker told Al-Akhbar in an interview.
Burnat traveled to Los Angeles, from Palestine via Turkey, to attend Sunday’s Academy Awards ceremony, where his film has been nominated for the “Best Documentary” category.
He was interrogated, detained for six hours, and had his fingerprints taken twice. Airport officers googled his name to confirm that he had indeed been nominated for an Oscar.
LAX officials at first told Burnat they intended to deny him entry to the United States. “I told them I don’t care if you send me back to Palestine, just don’t detain me for any longer,” Burnat said.
His wife and eight-year-old son, who is the documentary’s main character, were also held at the airport.
During his layover in Turkey’s Istanbul, Burnat was also questioned by airport security officials.
Asked whether he thought he was sought out because of his film, Burnat said: “I don’t know, but this is the first time this happens. I’ve been to the States six times in the last year.”
“5 Broken Cameras” documents non-violent resistance in Bil’in, a Palestinian village surrounded by Israeli settlements and Palestine’s Apartheid Wall. [++]
watch 5 broken cameras
I found a link so that everyone can watch it—at no cost—
Click this ————> http://thefile.me/a4flphbmpyvp
so now there’s no excuse—you must watch it!
If not now—later! Bookmark it!
Reblog—-spread the word!
(It’s on netflix too btw…)
Guy Davidi, '5 Broken Cameras' Co-Director, Responds To Israeli Slander Claims: 'Disturbing' (VIDEO)
huffingtonpost.comTumblr won’t let me embed the video, so you’ll have to click the link above to watch the interview. Here’s the story that Guy correctly describes as “disturbing”:
Guy Davidi, the Israeli co-director of Oscar-nominated documentary “5 Broken Cameras” joined HuffPost Live Thursday to speak out against claims that he and his Palestinian co-director Emad Burnat should be charged with slander because their film was critical of the Israeli occupation.
Israeli nonprofit Consensus has petitioned the Attorney General claiming that Davidi and Burnat — whose film traces the story of Burnat and his village’s nonviolent response as Israel’s settlements expanded into Palestinian territories in the occupied West Bank — should be charged with slander and prosecuted for “incitement.”
“The media in Israel is quite nourishing this story and supporting it,” Davidi told HuffPost Live host Ahmed Shihab-Eldin Thursday. “Obviously Israeli audiences are supporting this kind of lawsuit that will probably limit filmmakers in the future to create films that criticize the Israeli occupation.”
Israel’s outgoing Culture and Sports Minister Limor Livnat encouraged Israeli filmmakers to practice “self-censorship” and noted that she “wasn’t sorry” that “5 Broken Cameras” didn’t win the Best Documentary Feature Academy Award earlier this year, prompting a critical Haaretz editorial titled, “The censorship minister.”
“The film shows a lot of violations of human rights laws and a lot of violations that Israelis were not prepared to see,” Davidi added, noting that the film was shown on Israel’s major broadcaster. “Suddenly every Israeli could watch Israeli soldiers shooting, without any excuse, unarmed Palestinian demonstrators. So it created a lot of rage in Israeli communities.”
Davidi was critical of the Israeli media for focusing on the controversy around the film rather than the film’s message.
“No media, no channel, no program actually dealt with what the film is showing,” he told HuffPost Live. “They shift the discussion not to deal with what the film is showing but to deal with what we did to the Israeli image, or to the Israeli soldiers’ image and the military image. And that’s disturbing for me.”
Davidi previously joined HuffPost Live to push back against Israel’s claims that his movie was an “Israeli film,” saying that the government was trying to use him “to show the good face of Israel.”
