Selim is Palestinian and Ezra is Israeli. According to many around them, these men should be mortal enemies. Instead, they’re lovers. Samira is Palestinian and Edit is Israeli. These women have radically different visions of the country they live in. And yet they fall in love. Elle Flanders’ astounding new documentary takes us inside these two relationships, transgressive not just for being gay but inter-ethnic, as well. Selim lives in Jerusalem with Ezra, but he is constantly harassed by police and faces deportation. His struggle makes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict personal in a whole new way for Ezra, who becomes an advocate for displaced Palestinians, delivering supplies across borders, challenging young Israeli soldiers at every checkpoint. Samira’s view of Israel as an occupying force puts her at odds with Edit, whose family fled to Israel from Argentina and had great hopes for the new nation. But Edit, too, is growing bitter: as a rape counselor, she witnesses a startling spike in domestic abuse by soldiers returning from duty; the violence at the nation’s borders, she feels, has infected the nation’s heart. The film itself makes that case compellingly. With a consistent sense of mourning, Flanders artfully juxtaposes the 1960’s home movies of her own Zionist grandparents, traveling across the expansive holy land and brimming with hope, with images of the region today – a landscape of bulldozers, barbed-wire, and an endless network of walls. In Hebrew and Arabic with English subtitles.
Director Elle Flanders will attend the screening to discuss the film with the audience.
Elle Flanders was born in 1966 in Montreal and raised in Canada and Israel. She received her MFA from Rutgers University and is an alumnus of the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum. An independent filmmaker and photographer, her previous films include Bird on a Wire (2006), Once (2002), and Surviving Memory (1996). She is currently working on two new film projects, What Isn’t There and A Wolf at the Door.
Regal South Beach
7:30 pm Screening
$12 Non-Members/ $10 Members - BUY TICKETS
