- 5 Broken Cameras
- Production year: 2011
- Country: Rest of the world
- Cert (UK): 15
- Runtime: 90 mins
- Directors: Emad Burnat, Guy Davidi
- More on this film
Back in the late 70s and early 80s, before he embarked on the
grander
works that made him famous such as his Decalogue
series and his Tricolor
trilogy, Krzysztof Kieslowski made a
succession of films about politics
and personal responsibility.
One of the most notable is
Camera Buff
about Filip, a minor
functionary in a provincial Polish town who buys
an 8mm
camera to photograph his baby daughter. Very soon his boss
gets
him to make a film celebrating their factory, and thereafter,
for
better or worse, film comes to dominate Filip's life. The
obsession
breaks up his marriage and, as he makes increasingly
tendentious
pictures that threaten the authoritarian regime, he
comes to endanger
his colleagues and himself.
This subtle fiction from cold war days has an astonishing
resemblance to a non-fiction movie of today,
5 Broken Cameras,
one of the best, most involving documentaries of the past couple
of
years, shot entirely in and around a Palestinian village in the
occupied
West Bank. As in
Camera Buff, film-making figures
both as a
metaphor for social responsiveness and responsibility
and as a daily
fact for the director-protagonist of
5 Broken
Cameras. He's
Emad Burnat, the peasant and smallholder
who spends his days and nights
recording life about him in his
native Bil'in, the township where his
family has lived for
generations. Like Filip in
Camera Buff,
Emad bought his first
camera when his fourth son, Gibreel, was born in
2005. He
initially used it for home movies and then, at their
invitation, to
make similar pictures for his neighbours.
But
fairly soon Emad developed a sense of empowerment and
a duty to serve
his community. His camera became a way of
uniting his fellow citizens,
publicising their struggle and becoming
a witness for posterity when the
Israeli authorities sent in troops
to deprive them of land to create a
defensive barrier of steel and
wire that later became a high concrete
wall. Inevitably, seeing
this barrier going up in
Israel
we think of the wall surrounding the
Warsaw ghetto, the one that
appeared overnight in Berlin and the
one separating Catholics and
Protestants in Belfast. Emad was
not, however, politicised in the
orthodox way. He didn't become
an agent of any political faction and,
ironically, he paid for this
when some years later he was injured in a
driving accident
while going about his business. It left him in debt to
the Israeli
hospital where his life was saved, but he received no
compensation from the Palestinian authorities, which disclaimed
any
responsibility for his activities.
Emad made this film over five years, and the title refers to the
five
cameras that were variously smashed in action during
that time. At the
beginning of the movie they're proudly displayed
as battered souvenirs
of the struggle. Over the years they've
recorded the history of his
embattled village, both its private
and public sides. Several figures
dominate the story that Emad
narrates and comments upon. Up front at the
barricades are a
pair of dedicated friends. One is the vocal, not to
say rhetorical
Adeeb, risking bullets as he comes face to face with
Israeli
troops. The other is Bassem, a cheerful giant, much loved by
the
children and nicknamed "el-Phil" (the elephant). Like Emad
himself,
both are arrested, see members of their families go to
jail and pay the
price of passive resistance. Adeeb is seriously
wounded in the leg,
Bassem suffers even worse injuries after a
direct hit by a gas grenade.
Behind
this pair, but no less endangered, is Emad, recording
some of the
fiercest footage of assaults and atrocities on the
West Bank that I've
ever seen, as well as the arson wreaked
on Palestinian olive groves by
illegal Jewish settlers. He's
constantly threatened with physical injury
and the destruction
of his camera by the arrogant young soldiers, but
is always there,
arguing for his rights, though there is little he can
say when told he
lives in "a closed military zone" where he can't even
use a camera
in his own home. Always hovering around is the little
Gibreel,
trying to make sense of what he sees. Some of the earliest
words
he learns are "wall", "war" and "cartridge". There, too, is
Soraya,
Emad's wife, a handsome woman who ages before our eyes as the
years pass. When once again her husband is threatened with arrest,
she
pleads with him to back down and live a quieter life.
But there
are gentler, more hopeful moments in the movie, well
brought out by the
professional way Emad's raw, direct footage is
edited by Jewish-Israeli
film-maker Guy Davidi, who became
involved with the film after visiting
Bil'in with other supporters of
the West Bank resistants. There are
splendid moments, separated
over four years, in which the village
celebrates a legal victory and
its eventual implementation; a lovely
scene where the locals are
shown Emad's work-in-progress film to raise
their morale; and a
peculiarly moving shot of Gibreel handing a
sprig from a bulldozed
olive tree to an Israeli soldier, that's none the
worse for being staged.
5 Broken Cameras
is a polemical work and in no sense analytical.
It presents with
overwhelming power a case of injustice on a massive
scale, and gives us a
direct experience of what it's like to be on the
receiving end of
oppression and dispossession, administered by
the unyielding,
stony-faced representatives of those convinced of
their own
righteousness. But it isn't vindictive and has a sense of
history and
destiny. Much may be concealed, but what we are
shown and experience is
the resilient spirit of one village recorded
by a single observer.
