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Masafer Yatta is a cluster of 19 Palestinian villages located just on the edge of the internationally recognized border of the State of Israel, some 24km south of the city of Hebron.
In 1981 Israel unilaterally declared the land on which these villages are built as “firing zone 918”, so that its inhabitants became illegal residents of a military zone, at risk of being forcibly evicted.
Since then and until today, as a sort of reflection of the myth of Sisyphus, the pressure of the army demolishes houses during the day that are rebuilt by their inhabitants at night, in an eternal and absurd endless cycle.
The documentary shows this little-known reality (“as if it had happened but, at the same time, it has never happened”) within this Palestinian-Israeli conflict that has so many edges.
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And it does so through the eyes of Basel, a young Palestinian activist, and Yuval, an Israeli journalist who decides to support the former in his efforts and with whom he will end up becoming friends.
This is where the core, the soul of the documentary lies: beyond the scenes of violence (shocking insofar as they are real), what really moves, what demolishes more terribly than the Israeli bulldozers, is the relationship between the two young men, their conversations full of humanity, despair and sadness.
It is impossible not to experience a whole range of feelings watching the images: pain, anger, rage, sadness, tenderness, compassion, but what floods everything in the end is despair.
An infinite hopelessness as I have rarely seen on a screen, which travels through the dialogues between the two friends, especially in the last one that closes the documentary, beautiful and sad.
It is a documentary of people who seek in the possibilities of today's society to make their pain emerge to enliven public opinion and to be able, in the best of cases, to extend a certain flame of hope.
The mere fact of transmitting with beautiful and painful dialogues, natural and with feeling, all that the images fail to show, is a work of editing and script that stuns even the hardest heart.
To expose oneself as the protagonists have exposed themselves is the result of an extreme situation, but also of minds that understand that one cannot look the other way.