Obstacles to Peace: a film festival

The Association of Students for Human Rights presents “Obstacles to Peace,” a film festival which views the situation within Israel and the Occupied Territories through a lens of Human Rights. The films explore issues of identity between a variety of groups: Palestinian and Israeli, immigrant and native, homosexual and heterosexual, religious and secular, adult and child, highlighting the potential for abuse and hatred between each group. Though the films tend to portray the dark-side of human interaction, they also portray the many viewpoints of Israeli-Palestinian society beyond this dichotomy, therefore depicting
potential for peace especially in the stories of grassroots peacemakers who are making efforts to connect from all sides of the conflict.

We invite you to join us for this two-day event beginning Friday, November 6th at 7:30pm and continuing throughout the day on Saturday, November 7th. The event will be held at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver in the new Sié Chéou-Kang Center room 150. The festival will kick-off with Waltz With Bashir on Friday evening and will screen 7 films of various viewpoints and subject matter relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on Saturday.  Admission is free and we welcome you to attend any or all of the films.

FRIDAY, November 6th
7:30pm Waltz With Bashir (87m)

• Winner of the 2009 Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Film, Waltz with Bashir is an Israeli animated documentary that follows Ari Folman in search of his lost memories from the 1982 Lebanon War
  (click this link for more info and trailers)

SATURDAY, November 7th

10:30am: Promises (102min)

• Emmy Award Winner for Best Documentary, Promises documents the lives of seven children, Jewish and Palestinian, growing up in Jerusalem over the course of three years.  It aims to explore the nature of the many obstacles–physical, historical and emotional that exist between them. (click this link for more info and trailers)

12:30pm: Asylum City Video Project 2008-2009 (38m)

• ActiveVision provided video cameras to African refugee youth primarily from the Sudan and Eritrea to make eight short films that portray their lives after arriving to Israel on their own without legal status.

1:30pm: Checkpoint (80m)

• Traveling to the violently contested territories of Gaza and the West Bank, Checkpoint employs a cinema-verite style to show how the daily interactions that occur between Israeli guards and Palestinian citizens at the territories’ many checkpoints dehumanize both parties and often fan the flames of further animosities. (To read a review, click here)
  

3:30pm: Zero Degrees of Separation (89m)

• Zero Degrees of Separation looks at the Middle East conflict and the Palestinian Occupation, through the eyes of mixed Palestinian and Israeli gay and lesbian couples, including the renown human rights activist Ezra Nawi. (For more info, click here)
  

5:30pm: Breaking the Silence: Israeli Soldiers Talk About Hebron (37m)

• Since 2004, Breaking the Silence has collected testimonies from over 650 IDF soldiers who have served in the territories since the beginning of the second Intifadah. Their testimonies portray a different and grim picture of questionable orders regarding Palestinian civilians.

Inside God’s Bunker (40m)

• An exploration of the extreme tensions that exist in one of the most ideologically contested Arab cities/Israeli settlements in the West Bank: Hebron.  An older documentary that includes reporting of the Hebron massacre of February 1994.

7:30pm: Encounter Point (85m)

• Encounter Point is a film exploring the hope in a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict as it follows a former Israeli settler, a Palestinian ex-prisoner, a bereaved Israeli mother and a wounded Palestinian bereaved brother who risk their lives and public standing to promote a nonviolent end to the conflict. The film explores what drives them and thousands of other like-minded civilians to overcome anger and grief to work for grassroots solutions. (Click here for more info and trailers)