Route 181, Fragments D’un Voyage en Palestine-Israel : 17 Nov - 21st December

dublin | rights, freedoms and repression | event notice Thursday November 25, 2004 20:06 by eeekkk

Showing at Straylight Territories, Darklight 5
17th November – 21st December. Admission Free

Eyal Sivan and Michel Khleifi’s documentary film 'Route 181, Fragments D’un Voyage en Palestine-Israel' charts the filmmakers’ journey along the 1947 UN demarcation line for the partition plan for Palestine. They filmed the people and places they encountered as they traveled along this virtual border. Without making any judgments they inserted themselves into the lived experience of daily life as it takes place within these contested territories. The film documents incidents that take place, events that are unfolding or stories that are told by the people who populate this land. This journey was edited down to a 7 hour duration making Route 181 an epic documentary in a temporal sense.
“We filmed in such a way as to see things, men women, and places as a sum total not yet revealed. Carried along by chance meetings, together we listened to words, nature, passions and disillusions. We tried to induce – first in ourselves, then in the subjects we filmed – a loving relationship with the everyday, one full of danger and encounter with death. Men and women were provided with the opportunity to speak – those who have forgotten the official discourse, but who are nonetheless the basis of the two societies, those on whose behalf the war is waged.”

Through first hand interviews with inhabitants from the region, the filmmakers capture a situation that is as complex and multilayered as the plurality of the voices trying to describe it. Their intent is to convey a shared experience of displacement by studying a disputed territory that has been transformed into a fluctuating ruin. More than direct citations of these places, the film explores how the built environment can directly influence opposing formations of cultural identity.