Five Broken Cameras
Emad Burnat's documentary about the Israeli settlements encroaching Palestinian land will make you question your peace of mind. He is a common farmer, a normal father of four beautiful sons. But by the virtue of his camera(s), becomes a kind of a living chronicle of the resistance towards Israeli audacity. You see him experiencing the brunt of meaningless violence through the lenses of his five cameras that are broken in the course of five years at the end of which you cannot expect a happy ending because this is real life.
Gibreel's birthdays punctuate the growth of the resistance which more and more villagers embrace, even beyond Bil'in. The innocence of the children is not exactly juxtaposed with the army's grenades and tear gas because even a sensitive child like Gibreel wants to kill because hate and anger are not easy to ignore when your closest friends are shot dead at random.
You see Emad's cameras saving and endangering his life simultaneously - he is targeted because of his filming that the Israeli soldiers feel threatened by, but his life is also saved because the bullet gets lodged in the camera, barely missing his face. His wife Soraya begs him to stop, she cannot take the anxiety any more, but you keep asking yourself why the filming is so important. In the end, you don't see hope, but like the note at which Khaled Hosseini ended his first novel, you can find the beginnings of hope.
