ISRAEL: Juliette Binoche stars in a dramatic film about Israel's 2005 withdrawal from Gaza

Record ID: 395593

  • Title: ISRAEL: Juliette Binoche stars in a dramatic film about Israel's 2005 withdrawal from Gaza
  • Date: 5th April 2007
  • Summary: (SOUNDBITE) (English) AMOS GITAI, ISRAELI DIRECTOR OF "DISENGAGEMENT" FILM, SAYING: "The Middle East is not an area of subtle refine. We are in a kind of a volcanic area. It is constant eruptions. So we don't have the distance people that in Europe would have had about their culture, it became kind of a souvenir. We are living a contemporary and very powerful story and wh
  • Embargoed: 20th April 2007 13:00
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  • Location: Israel
  • Country: Israel
  • Reuters ID: LVAJBGY58G28KX9J8LTSAOKXMIZ
  • Story Text: French-born actress Juliette Binoche was in Israel to play the leading role in the first dramatic film made about one of Israel's most emotional political campaigns -- the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza.
    In one of the movie's most violent scenes, Binoche is seen passing by troops marching, Israeli policemen scuffling with settlers, angry settlers forcibly removed from a home, a bulldozer demolishing a house, a police helicopter hovering, a Palestinian mob protesting, all caught in a one long camera shot filmed on Thursday (March 29).
    The making of the movie comes less than two years after the evacuation, known by its official Israeli term "Disengagement", which for many in Israel remains a traumatic event.
    Israeli film director and screenwriter Amos Gitai said that the rapid pace of events in the region does not leave much place for historical perspective.
    "The Middle East is not an area of subtle refine. We are in a kind of a volcanic area. It is constant eruptions. So we don't have the distance people in europe would have had about their culture," Gitai said on the set of his film.
    "We are living a contemporary very powerful story and why not make a film? Why not cinema making an interpretation of this very dramatic charged context? Anyway, cinema can also contribute to understanding, to getting out of a caricature cliché," he added.
    In the film called "Disengagement", Binoche plays a French woman searching for her daughter, who is among some 8,000 Jewish settlers resentfully evacuated from Gaza in a whirlwind military operation.
    Binoche's character arrives in Israel in the midst of the turmoil of the military-enforced evacuation and destruction of 21 Jewish settlements in Gaza.
    To prepare for her role, Binoche watched documentaries and discovered the different aspects of in the story.
    "I understand now more the feeling what people went through, watching a lot of hours of dailies. As when I was in Europe for me it was normal, I didn't see any problem why it was a big problem, you know? Because history speaks, that the settlers came 30 years ago and now they have to leave, it seems normal from an outsider's point of view. But when you are inside and you understand a little bit of the story it is more complex," Binoche said.
    After portraying headstrong women caught in the European battlefields of World War Two and the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia, 42-year-old Binoche said she, like the character she is playing, is not taking sides in the sensitive political affair.
    "She is just asking the simple questions. You know, why this, why that. Because she is an outsider and I feel that my role in a way, even though she is involved, you know, personally she came here to, you know, to be in contact with her daughter and it is very strong, but still, there is an outsider feeling which is good to tell the story," Binoche said.
    The set of the film was built in view of Nitzan, a community which temporarily inhabits hundreds of families of Gaza settlers evacuated in 2005. The coastal area is a few miles north of the Gaza Strip.
    Gitai, who spent months looking for the location of the set, has made no secret of his left-leaning views -- the kind not generally shared by Israeli settlers, who are often ultranationalists and whose enclaves on the occupied territory are viewed abroad as illegal.
    Gitai said the idea of making this movie sparked when his son, who had been under military service and participated in the evacuation of settlers from Gaza, called his father to watch the pullout.
    "Even if you disagree with the settlers, which I do -- I disagree with them politically -- it is still always difficult to see somebody watching his house being broken so I don't think it has to do, and it that sense my heart goes for Palestinians, Israelis, Arabs, anyone who looses the place they grew up in. I think that if we go away from the schematic view, maybe there will be peace," Gitai said.
    Gitai's past films include "Free Zone", which explores Jewish-Arab tensions in the Holy Land, and "Kippur", a gritty yet painful account of the 1973 Middle East war that draws on the director's experiences as a soldier on the front line. His politically charged projects have a large following in Europe.
    "Disengagement" is an Israeli-French-Italian co-production filmed in Israel, Avignon in France and Cologne in Germany.
    Also slated to appear in "Disengagement" is Jeanne Moreau, a grande dame of French cinema.
    Binoche first achieved international acclaim for her turn in the 1988 adaptation of "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," Milan Kundera's novel about anti-Soviet uprising in Prague.
    She won an Academy Award as best supporting actress in "The English Patient" (1996), in which she played a Canadian nurse tending to wounded Allied troops during World War Two.
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