Renowned critics of Israeli policies – Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Sara Roy and Robert Fisk – provide personal substance and historical perspective to their arguments in this impressive film by New Zealander Sarah Cordery.
New Zealand filmmaker Sarah Cordery’s analysis of the Israel-Palestine conflict argues implicitly for justice, with eloquence and careful deliberation.
Screened as part of NZIFF 2014
notes to eternity 2014
In a world where political debate often resembles a shouting match, it is disconcerting to encounter a thoroughly political film that credibly assumes the voice of reason. New Zealand filmmaker Sarah Cordery’s long-gestated consideration of the Israel–Palestine conflict draws its steady tone from three key commentators whose views have been shaped to various degrees by their own personal histories. All three are Jews who grew up immersed in Jewish culture. Now Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein and Sara Roy are amongst the most eloquent of the disaffected, calling for justice for the Palestinian people. The film’s fourth major participant is another renowned critic of Israel, journalist Robert Fisk, who brings the more febrile voice of frontline testimony to the film’s careful accumulation of historical perspective. In a film of many words and incisive intellectual analysis, the pictures bear eloquent witness too, coolly distanced in their framing of the flagrant damning evidence: the advancing settlements; the monstrous, defiantly defaced wall; and the daily affront of border crossings faced by Palestinians within the land that bore them.