PUTNEY-On Sunday, March 23, in a demonstration of openness and solidarity, over 300 people filled the Latchis Theatre to watch the Academy Award–winning movie No Other Land, the first of four movies of the Palestine Film Series.
The movie portrays a Palestinian family and community in the West Bank, enduring and resisting Israel's systematic destruction of their homes and schools, and the seizure of their lands. The film depicts just a few incidents of the devastating violence inflicted on Palestinian villagers by the hundreds of thousands of armed, Israeli "settlers," who occupy over 150 illegal "settlements."
The day after the Latchis screening, a group of such masked "settlers" viciously attacked Hamdan Ballal, the co-director of this movie. They beat him. He sustained injuries to his head and stomach, and he was left bleeding.
Soldiers swarmed the ambulance, and then seized and abducted Ballal. Yuval Abraham, the Israeli co-director of the movie, reported that Ballal was "handcuffed all night and beaten in a military base."
The four movies included in this film series bring us inside the lives of such everyday Palestinian people as they attempt to survive and resist.
I hope you will attend one or both of the remaining movies: Walled Off, on April 6, and The Teacher, on April 13, Sundays at 4 p.m. at the Latchis Theatre.
John Field
Putney
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