Route 181, fragments d’un voyage en Palestine-Israel
France/ Belgium / England,
2003, 270 min
Shown in 2004
CREDITS
- dir
-
Michel Khleifi, Eyal Sivan
- prod
-
Armelle Laborie
- scr
-
Michel Khleifi, Eyal Sivan
- cam
-
Phillipe Bellaïche
- editor
-
Sari Ezous
- source
-
WORLD SALES Momento, 38 rue de la Chine, 75010 Paris, France. FAX: 33-1-43-66-86-00. EMAIL: momento.distribution@wanadoo.fr.
- premiere
-
North American Premiere
-
COMMENTS
Michel Khleifi, Eyal Sivan in person.
OTHER
A cinema verité road movie, Route 181 is an intriguing collaborative documentary between internationally acclaimed Palestinian and Israeli directors Michel Khleifi and Eyal Sivan. This film will offer no consolation to the viewer yearning for a perspective, but gestures instead towards a more enigmatic tone, neither objective nor subjective, that cannot be reduced to dubious neutrality. Khleifi and Sivan make a judicious use of the interview format, as they follow and remap the contours of the 1947 partition line, moving alongside familiar images and narratives of occupation, loss and a peace that has not arrived—settlements, checkpoints, exclusionary migration policies, suicide attacks, archeological sites, racialized communities, ruins, war museums and memorials. Route 181 is a tour de force insofar that it allows something ambiguous to emerge that requires us to rethink the hyphen between Israel-Palestine beyond optimism or pessimism. Khleifi and Sivan manage to carve a courageous space not of naive reconciliation, but one that simply reminds us that forgetting is also a powerful faculty of memory, at once personal, political and ethical. “How to forget” is perhaps to be found in a chilling interview with an Israeli soldier that turns unexpectedly into a fascinating discussion about Kafka’s "Before the Law." Coincidental? Are Khleifi and Sivan searching for a language of forgetting, like Kafka?
—Tarik el Haik
FACTOID #134
The 1986 San Francisco International’s Discovering Mike Leigh was the director’s first retrospective in the U.S. According to the San Francisco Examiner, Festival Artistic Director Peter Scarlet compared the then-unknown Leigh to Yasujiro Ozu before his work had achieved international recognition; while the latter director had been considered ’too Japanese’ for global audiences, Leigh was considered ’too British.’
