Content area
Full Text
"The checkpoints are a factory for producing terrorists," observes a Palestinian in Ford Transit, Hany Abu-Assad's film about the taxis that carry Palestinians between the welter of checkpoints that the Sharon government claims to have set up to insure Israel's safety. By humiliating Palestinians on a daily basis and depriving them of any semblance of a normal life, "Operation Defensive Shield" has had the opposite effect: witness the increasing frequency of suicide bombings. An emblem of a disastrous impasse in Palestinian-Israeli relations, the checkpoints are the focus of several other recent Palestinian films, including Elia Suleiman's Divine Intervention, Rashid Masharawi's Ticket to Jerusalem, and Annemarie Jacir's succinct and powerful short like twenty impossibles.
A Palestinian filmmaker born in Chicago and raised in Saudi Arabia, 29-year-old Jacir attended high school in Texas and college in California and did her graduate degree at Columbia University's Film Department. The 17-minute like twenty impossibles is her thesis film, shot in December 2001 and edited over a period of 16 months. The lengthy post-production was the result of financial difficulties and her own obsession with getting the edit exactly right. After receiving a Jerome Foundation grant, she completed the film in three weeks.
like twenty impossibles concerns a young, female Palestinian-American director named Anne-Marie (played by Reem Abu-Sbaih, a Palestinian-American homeopathic doctor from Brooklyn whom Jacir met in the West Bank while she was casting) and her small team-a cameraman, a sound recordist, and an actor-who run into trouble while attempting to reach Jerusalem. When the main checkpoint is closed before their van is allowed through, they take a back road, only to be stopped by a surprise Israeli roadblock. Demanding to see ID cards and permits, the soldiers force the soundman and the actor out of the...