Results 1971 - 1980 of 3048 for the search term
NEXT WAVE SPOTLIGHT. In 2007 Banksy slips into Palestine to paint on the West Bank Barrier. Someone takes offense at a piece depicting an Israeli soldier checking a donkey’s ID. A local taxi driver decides to cut it off and sell it on eBay. What follows is a story of clashing cultures, art, identity, theft and black market. Like Banksy’s art would be meaningless without its context, so the absence of it would be meaningless without an understanding of the elements that brought his artwork from Bethlehem to a Western auction house, along with the wall it was painted on.
In Nazi-occupied Paris, the young writer Marguerite Duras strikes up a delicate, high stakes entanglement with a Vichy collaborator named Rabier, who promises preferential treatment for her imprisoned husband in exchange for her attention and collaboration. As the drumbeat of arrests of Jews and political dissidents continues, the now-celebrated experimental author is wracked with fear for her husband and the friends and anti-Nazi activists whose identities Rabier pressures her to reveal.
Considered one of the elite intelligence agencies in the world, the Mossad was created in 1949 as an insurance policy to defend the state of Israel. Utilizing intimate interviews, first person accounts, startling archival photographs and news footage, some leading figures in Israel’s intelligence community reveal their successes, failures and near misses. Although many were reluctant to discuss highly sensitive topics with the media, the cold calculations of their secret operations gradually unfold.
Vilnius was once known as the “Jerusalem of the North,” but by 1943 its vibrant Jewish community had been decimated from 80,000 before the war to only 600 survivors. Based on records from the 1963 ten-day trial of SS officer Franz Murer, known as the “Butcher from Vilnius,” this transfixing courtroom drama restages the vivid testimonies, World Jewish Congress conspiracy theories and unruly behind-the-scenes machinations of the case with an aptly titled “anatomical” intensity.
Housing one of the world’s greatest collections of art and antiquities, the Israel Museum poses for its own portrait in this elegant observational documentary, revealing its central role in the complicated narrative of the nation. We eavesdrop on curators, museum guards, archaeological conservators, and visiting schoolchildren, who together form a kaleidoscopic picture of the way art, history and national destiny intersect. Ultimately, the museum emerges as a shining example of a nation’s highest aspirations.
Award-winning filmmaker Julia Bacha (Encounter Point, Budrus SFJFF 2010) specializes in documentaries about the struggle for democracy in the Middle East. Her dynamic portrait of Palestinian activist Naila Zakout begins as one woman’s fight against the occupation and grows into a complex quilt of women’s stories. Bacha delves into the first intifada, the Madrid peace talks and the Oslo Accords, offering a crash course in the conflict from the unique perspective of Palestinian women.
Carrie Goldberg, an internet privacy attorney; Anita Sarkeesian, a media critic and activist; and Tina Reine, a financial trader whose career was derailed by a vicious campaign of cyber harassment, are the three extraordinary subjects profiled. Coinciding with the #MeToo movement, as the internet becomes the next frontier for civil rights, the arc of the online moral universe may also be long, but here too, Netizens shows it bending towards justice.
Nadia Murad, a 23-year-old Yazidi refugee and reluctant activist who was appointed a UN Goodwill Ambassador, is the subject of this piercing, powerful and critically acclaimed documentary. Alexandria Bombach, winner of the directing prize at Sundance this year, deftly captures the complexity of being a survivor and an outcast in search of a homeland, an all-too-common experience that must be told in order for genocide to truly happen “never again”.
EAST BAY OPENING NIGHT. In 1992, with Israeli-Palestinian relations at a low and official communication suspended, an unlikely group of negotiators—two Israeli professors and three PLO members—met secretly in Norway. Faced with a Palestinian uprising in the West Bank, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin needed a new direction. The political drama with all its intrigue, suspicion and discord is told through the actual diaries of the negotiators and the long-discarded footage of the actual Oslo negotiations.
How much is a life worth? What is the monetary value of a livelihood lost to 9/11? How do you put a price on losses of this magnitude? These are the questions Kenneth Feinberg routinely wrestles with in his role as the overseer of funds disbursing tens of billions of dollars for damage claims and death benefits. He inhabits a unique role in the American legal system, where everything—including a life—has a price.