Robert Greenwald
The documentary is about the Palestinian journalists, over two hundred of whom have been killed by Israel since the war began. The reason I decided to make the film has a couple of layers to it. Number one, as a Jew from New York City, and as someone who has done a lot of films and work around war, I felt morally — it was a moral necessity that I do something. This was against the advice of many people who were of the school that everything Israel does is accurate, defensible, a reaction to being under attack. I disagreed with that.
The more I researched it, the more I saw clips, the more we heard from people in Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel, the stronger my commitment to doing something became.
Then the question becomes: What could or should we do that wasn’t already being done? Because some of it was being covered — tragically not enough, but some of it was being covered. And I decided to tell the story of journalists on the assumption that the killing of so many journalists, an unprecedented number of journalists, would force the traditional media to write about it. And I was wrong. We’ve had almost zero success in getting any of the more traditional media in the United States to cover it.
On the other hand, we are reaching people, I believe — not the haters, not the people who think any Palestinian should be killed — but we are reaching people who don’t care about the issue, people who don’t see it affecting them and have tuned out. From that point of view, I believe the five hundred screenings are a significant beginning of that, and I think we will help move people to take action.
The other part of it is, there’s a huge racist element in all of this. I felt if we could humanize a few journalists, it would be much stronger than numbers, because numbers are just numbers. Often, when people ask me what Brave New Films does, I say we put a face on policy. This is a classic case of our doing that. So we used the research from the Committee to Protect Journalists, which is very robust, very respected. They had [detailed information about] 150, 170 journalists who had been killed.
We went through the research — an extraordinary team at Brave New Films, very small — and we wound up picking three different journalists. The idea was to have some age variety, some mix of gender, and of background. But then most importantly was this: Could we bring them back through social media? So [our team] really dug into the social media accounts. We found this extraordinary footage, extraordinary in retrospect, because the journalists had been killed.
A father and his daughter at a birthday party — simple human things that anybody and everybody could relate to. That was a process that took months of research and finding clips. Then, when there was a relative or a colleague, we’d reach out and let them know we were doing this, both to be respectful, and to see if there was anything we were missing or if there was any footage they had. We actually had people film themselves — extraordinary courage, in Gaza!
The sister [Sabrine Al-Abadla] of the woman journalist [Heba Al-Abadla] we profiled made a video of herself talking about the loss of her sister. Get this — fifty-five of her relatives were killed. The fact that this woman could walk and talk, and wanted to help get the story out there, is extraordinary to me.
Great Job Robert Greenwald & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
