Wall

Longtime documentary filmmaker Simone Bitton’s Sundance award-winning Wall explores the physical and psychological dimensions of the barrier being built to divide Israel and the Palestinian territories. Bitton, a Mizrahi Jew who is fluent in Hebrew and Arabic, interviews Israelis and Palestinians who live and work close to this structure. Members of both communities are involved in building the wall, and all are affected by the rupture it creates in the landscape. Bitton’s painterly cinematography and restrained pacing, reminiscent of an Abbas Kiarostami film, allow her subjects to speak for themselves. The film, dubbed "a documentary fresco" by its director, elegantly fixes on the wall both as a symbol and as a mundane, graffiti-covered and pockmarked mass of cement. Bitton’s interviewees include a representative of the Israeli Defense Force who describes the construction, rationale and cost of the wall, and a kibbutz official who eloquently points out the irony of a people who were once crowded into ghettos now intentionally walling themselves in. Even 15 years after the destruction of the Berlin Wall, the images shown in Wall cannot help but reverberate with the archetypal images of what was, until now, the world’s most debated partition.

Simone Bitton was born in Morocco in 1955. She is both an Israeli and a French citizen and also considers herself as a Moroccan national and an Arab Jew. She graduated from the French Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinematographiques (IDHEC) in 1981 and directed more than 15 documentary films. Her work varies in style from historical inquiries to first-hand reportages and intimate portraits of cutting-edge authors, artists, and political figures. All of her films attest to her deep personal and professional commitment to better representing the complex histories and cultures of the Middle East and North Africa. Several of her works have been broadcast simultaneously on European, Arab, and Israeli television and engendered passionate debate on all sides of the Mid-East conflict. WALL is her first feature film produced for the cinema.