April 23, 2012
Dear Friends,
Some time ago I sent out a newsletter about Blood Relation and received great responses and orders from university libraries and others, so I'm bringing this film to your attention again. My personal opinion is that this is one of the most compeling films about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Blood Relation is another wonderful example of a personal story which uncovers the complicated political history of Israel and Palestine. This is an award winning film by young director Noa Ben Hagai, a moving film that turns national questions into family and personal dilemmas.
When Ben Hagai started her search after a missing aunt, she did not expect to find old and painful family secrets hidden in a Palestinian refugee camp in Nablus. The film reveals the story of the forgotten aunt who married a Muslim Palestinian and raised her children in a world utterly different from her original Jewish Israeli family world. Two branches of the same family, living side by side, separated by national conflicts and borders, facing difficult and disturbing dilemmas, while Ben Hagai attempts to achieve reunion and reconciliations.
The family deals with guilt and suspicions affected by years of Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in which family members from both sides of the border took part in some way or the other. Will the blood relation be enough to keep the family together?
"Both these stories, past and present, are compelling as family dramas, the kind of tales packed with secrets and lies that lurk in so many families. But they also serve as a poignant parable for the wider Middle East conflict, highlighting the many ways in which, after all, the war of Arabs and Israelis resembles a family affair." — (Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian)
Best
Nahum Laufer
Docs For Education
Our current catalog includes the following films:
Seeds of Summer
Follows the girls in one of the IDF’s most rigorous combat courses and looks at the relationships that develop in the strict military environment.
Badal and
Lady Kul El-ArabThese two films by the prominent Arab Israeli filmmaker Ibtisam Salh Mara'ana depict women in the Arab society.
The Darien Dilemma and
Rafting to Bombay
Two films by Erez Laufer, each telling a unique and little-known story of WWII and the destinies of Jewish refugees.
I'm not a Filipina
A film about a blind daughter of migrant workers in Israel, from award-winning filmmaker Anat Tal.
Murder of a Hatmaker
From famous French director Catherine Bernstein, a film about The Holocaust in France.
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