I was lucky enough to see this documentary by Simone Bitton's festival International Ferrara, almost two months ago. I do not think I had many other occasions, and it is sad that the film has not enjoyed more widespread because Rachel is a courageous and dignified.
We are told the last day Rachel Corrie's life , U.S. activist 's International Solidarity Movement in Rafah killed March 16, 2003 by a bulldozer while opposing the Israeli army demolished the home of Samir Nasrallah, a Palestinian pharmacist. Rachel was twenty-three and a couple of months was in the Gaza Strip with other ISM activists, committed as "human shields" during the second Intifada.
The French-Israeli has collected a large amount of material: there are the filmed testimonies of the young fellow Rachel, as the Israeli authorities and those of the Palestinian inhabitants of the houses that the activists of the ISM had gone to defend. We are the parents of the murdered girl, her teacher and then a number of film footage, read in voice over e-mail that Rachel sent to her mother from Palestine alternates the stories of those who knew and loved.
There are essentially two purposes of the film: the first is to reconstruct the identity of the girl and groped to explain the reason for his choices, the second is to show the absurdity of the Arab-Israeli conflict, but these goals are actually indistinguishable since the war appears to us through the eyes of Rachel and his companions, while the same blank look irretrievably with every passing day spent in the Gaza Strip. Similarly, the merit of the work is double: first, directing the show great sensitivity in telling the soul of a person "without" and the portrait of Rachel is deep and touching, though never in poor pathetic. The various pieces of evidence used in the film are made to order in a fully delineated character, which becomes very clear rationale and objectives: despite being the daughter of its original culture, individualism and welfare, Rachel is a figure Another is that the meaning of life all-encompassing experience of elsewhere. Experience irreversible, like guess the letters his mother, if death had not learned, Rachel would not have been able to return to a certain world view and a short-sighted, calm individualism, these traits that probably had never been his, but that feature in an increasingly stifling the contemporary West, wherever it is.
The other great talent in the film is its size: Rachel is deployed, yes, but by no means a fanatic. It 's a movie that asks questions, observing and not condemnation. Nevertheless, his opinion is clear in showing the folly of that war and any war because war does not require thought, but only action, and thus transforms the people still object before deciding conflicts between friends and enemies among us and their . Only in this way it becomes possible to shoot for fun and acceptable to the houses across the border to raze civilian homes as if they were dominoes, ignore all the attributes of humanity of the "other side". The testimony of the young and anonymous Israeli tank crewman is terrifying because it reveals that at the point where he is now all is lost in terms of subjectivity remains only the ranks and roles, and to follow orders, and no space remains to realize the lives of others, or much less to make a comparison of its existence and that of those who which happens to be considered, with a horrible simplification enemies. In this foul blindness, the same with which the Israeli army tries to prove that Rachel's death was an accident, the result of a simple chain of cause and effect set in motion by irresponsible actions, the film contrasts with the clear gaze of protagonist: a vision that has at its center the individual, takes the form of observation and understanding, and becomes finally chosen and concrete action - and heroic. Rachel Corrie was and will remain the occurrence of a different color, when the horror is overflowing and everything is almost as bleak, impossible to perceive and understand. And if the specter of the futility and oblivion still seems to scare some of those who were companions of the murdered girl, the film ends with the images, sad but full of light, graffiti with the name of Rachel on the walls of houses in Rafah: to show the loving memory of the population towards a girl coming from the opposite side of the world to find his house.
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