Wall

Filmed along the massive separation barrier built by the Israeli army in the West Bank, Mur is a cinematic meditation on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in which the director blurs the lines of hatred by affirming her dual identity as a Jew and an Arab. At the construction site of the wall, everyday words and sacred songs, in Hebrew and Arabic, resist the warmongering rhetoric and pave the way for a last glimpse of the beauty of this land and its inhabitants, amid the noise of drills and grades.

Discussion with director Simone Bitton and Leila Shahid.

Duration: 98’
Production year: 2004
Country: FR, ISR
Language: AR, HE Subtitles: EN

Film Festival - World Cinema Special Jury Prize
Cannes Film Festival - Directors Fortnight

Simone Bitton

Simone Bitton was born in Morocco in 1955 and divides her time between Paris, Rabat and Jerusalem. She graduated from the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques (IDHEC) in 1981. Her oeuvre consists of more than two dozen films and documentary series for cinema and television. Her work is formally diverse - investigative documentaries, archival editing, poetic essay films, first-hand reports and intimate portraits of avant-garde writers, artists and political figures - without shying away from her political commitment to the history, culture and contemporary context of the Middle East and North Africa, a deep personal and professional commitment that her films attest to. The series she directed, Les grandes voix de la Chanson Arabe (1990), and the film Palestine, the history of a land (1993), are reference works that are still being distributed and broadcast in several countries 20 years after their release. Wall (2004) and Rachel (2009) have won several awards, including the Sundance Special Jury Prize and the César Award. Bitton teaches at the Université Paris-VIII-Vincennes-Saint-Denis and is a member of the Ateliers Varan.

Original title: Mur

Simone Bitton

Credits