Subscribe to free
Pharisee Watch

Gifts Accepted Here

Gaza  Strip

A film by
James Longley

74 minutes, USA, color, 2002

“Beautiful, heartbreaking, raw and revealing…”
Daily Star

* * *

“An unflinchingly honest portrayal of a population under siege…
deserves the widest possible audience.”
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs

 * * *

"Deserves merit and attention...one of the most
important documentaries of recent times."
Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice

synopsis:

Gaza Strip pushes the viewer headlong into the tumult of the Israeli-occupied Gaza, examining the lives and views of ordinary Palestinians.

The documentary often sees the world through the eyes of young people. The central character is Mohammed Hejazi, a 13-year-old paperboy in Gaza City, one of the young “stone-throwers” who risk their lives throwing rocks at Israeli tanks across the barbwire fences. As the newspapers arrive announcing Ariel Sharon’s victory in the Israeli elections, Mohammed offers up tirades against Arafat and Sharon alike. We also catch glimpses of his inner world: his sense of hopelessness, his sorrow at the IDF killing of his best friend, his conception of death.

As the camera floats through the Gaza Strip, we encounter signs of the occupation everywhere: crowds of Palestinians are making their way along the beach on foot, donkey carts and tractor trailers when the Israeli soldiers close the roads. The Palestinians interviewed as they pass by reveal a common internal conflict, between anger at the Israeli occupation and the desire to live in peace.

In the Khan Younis refugee camp, Gaza Strip documents an extremely controversial incident in February, which fell largely through the cracks of international scrutiny, when the Israeli Defense Forces used an unidentified, powerful gas during a firefight, hospitalizing over 200 Palestinians with severe recurrent convulsions.

Inside a Red Cross tent near an Israeli checkpoint, a Palestinian mother and daughter debate the politics of their situation. As night falls on their camp, the mother describes how Israeli soldiers came with bulldozers, leveled their home and destroyed all of their belongings.

The eye of the film is usually passive and watchful, sometimes almost invisible, even in the most intimate settings. When a Palestinian child is blown up in Rafah, we see the entire process of his internment, from morgue to mosque to grave, unblinkingly. The camera moves slowly over a Palestinian neighborhood being strafed by Israeli machine-gun fire, schoolchildren scattering.

Gaza Strip culminates in a nighttime raid in April, when Israeli bulldozers stormed into the Khan Younis refugee camp under the cover of tank and helicopter fire, and destroyed the homes of 450 Palestinians – the first of many such armed incursions into “Area A” by the IDF.

Order "Gaza Strip"

short synopsis:

In January of 2001, American director James Longley traveled to the Gaza Strip.  His plan was to stay for two weeks to collect preliminary material for a documentary film on the Palestinian Intifada.  It was during his stay that Ariel Sharon was elected as Israeli Prime Minister.  As violence erupted around him, Longley threw away his return ticket and filmed for the next three months, acquiring nearly 75 hours of footage.  Gaza Strip, his first feature documentary, is an extraordinary and painful journey into the lives of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip struggling with the day-to-day trials of the Israeli occupation.  Filmed in verité style and without narration, Gaza Strip at last gives voice to a population largely ignored by mainstream media.

director biography:

James Longley was born in Oregon in 1972 and received a film education at the University of Rochester and Wesleyan University in the United States, and the Russian Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) in Moscow. James received the Student Academy Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his short documentary, “Portrait of Boy with Dog,” about a boy in a Moscow orphanage. “Gaza Strip,” his first feature documentary, was produced on location during the spring of 2001.

production credits:

DIRECTOR / PRODUCER.………………………...…...…………....James LONGLEY
CAMERA.…………………………………………………..…………James LONGLEY
ADDITIONAL CAMERA.……………….………………..………………Abed SHANA
SOUND.…………………………………………………………….....James LONGLEY
EDITOR………...………………………………………….……….…James LONGLEY
ASSISTANT EDITOR………...……………………………….………...Afaf SHAWWA
MUSIC.…………………………..……………………………………James LONGLEY
PRODUCTION COORDINATOR (Gaza).………………..…..Mohammed MOHANNA
TRANSLATIONS.…………………………………………………..……Mark KHANO

                                                                                                                      Abed YOUNIS
                                                                                                               Sherene SEIKALY
                                                                                                                Karim KOBEISSI
                                                                                                                   Souad KIRAMA
                                                                                                       Romain DE KERALIO
                                                                                                          Gerard WOLDVEDT
                                                                                                               Mia LOTRINGER
                                                                                                                        Rana EL-FIL
                                                                                                                    Afaf SHAWWA
                                                                                                  Waleed AL GHARAIBEH
                                                                                                                    Degaulle ADILI

reviews:

New York Times
Reviewed by: A.O. Scott

“Hard Life in Gaza, Through 13-Year-Old Eyes”

Like most news reports and television images coming out of the Middle East these days, "Gaza Strip," an unsparing new documentary by James Longley, offers little reason for optimism. The film, which opens today at the Anthology Film Archives in the East Village, was shot in the winter and spring of 2001, and it provides a grim, upsetting glimpse at the lives of some of the 1.2 million Palestinians who live in the crowded cities and refugee camps of Gaza.

Mr. Longley makes powerful use of the techniques of cinema vérité. The absence of voice-over narration and talking-head interviews gives his portrait of daily life under duress a riveting immediacy.

Much of "Gaza Strip" follows Mohammed Hejazi, a 13-year-old newspaper vendor. This youth, who left school after the second grade, spends much of his spare time with other boys throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers, even though his best friend was killed by the gunfire that is the inevitable response, and his father, who had spent time in an Israeli prison, once tied his son up to keep him at home.

Mohammed presents a mixture of hardened cynicism and childish innocence that is both heartbreaking and unnerving. He is equally contemptuous of Ariel Sharon, whose election as prime minister takes place early in the film, of Mr. Sharon's predecessor Ehud Barak and of Yasir Arafat, and he fluctuates between weary sorrow and militaristic bravado. ("We want weapons. We don't want food.")

A similar mixture of emotions is expressed by the adults in the film. Sometimes in the same breath, they give voice to longings for peaceful coexistence with Israel, to the wish to be left alone and to the desire to drive the Jews not only out of Gaza but out of the region altogether.

Mr. Longley's camera does not have to look far to find the sources of their rage and despair: Israeli bulldozers demolishing houses and date groves; an absurd traffic jam on the beach after roads have been closed; emergency rooms full of wounded Palestinians, many of them children. It is impossible to see these images and remain unmoved, but the raw intensity of "Gaza Strip" is also a limitation, since it is purchased by the absence of anything (aside from some text at the beginning) that would provide some historical or political context.

Given how polarized discussions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have become, this means that audiences will watch through their own ideological filters. Some will see the film as evidence of the bottomless cruelty of the Israeli occupation. Others will note the absence not only of any Israeli perspective, but also of any discussion of the deadlier forms of Palestinian resistance or the popularity of Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the desperate neighborhoods of Gaza.

Then again, it is not Mr. Longley's intention to analyze the conflict, and in the best vérité tradition, there are moments in "Gaza Strip" that disclose a wrenching human reality deeper and more basic than any politics. At one point Mohammed muses on death and the afterlife. His words cut against much of what we have heard lately about the Muslim view of martyrdom and paradise.

He imagines receiving a stern interrogation from God - "Why did you throw those rocks?" "Why did you steal?" – after which he will be sent to heaven or hell, he doesn't know which. After some thought, he decides that he would be happiest in the solitude of purgatory. Such is the aspiration of a boy in Gaza.   

The Seattle Times
Reviewed by: John Hartl

“Compelling Palestinian Film Benefits From Narrow Focus”

The stares of lost, desperate Palestinian children dominate this surprisingly personal documentary, which was shot two years ago by James Longley, an Oregon filmmaker who once studied cinematography at a Moscow film school.

The images in "Gaza Strip" are often as beautiful as they are disturbing, suggesting a continuous loop of the final freeze-frame image from Francois Truffaut's 1959 classic, "The 400 Blows," in which a young boy accuses the audience with his eyes when he realizes he is trapped between adult authorities and the ocean.

Not that the sea can't also be a refuge here. As Longley's video camera dwells on a languorous beach scene, one child describes the Mediterranean as "so beautiful that you forget yourself." Still, the waves are part of a border that makes children and older Palestinians feel trapped, surrounded and ultimately suicidal.

Longley visited the Gaza Strip in January 2001, planning to stay for a couple of weeks while he researched a film on the Palestinian intifada. He remained for three months, focusing on an eloquent 13-year-old newspaper vendor, Mohammed Hejazi, who speaks frankly about the murder of his best friend, his contempt for Ariel Sharon, his mistrust of Yasser Arafat ("Arafat is a spy"), and the difference between this life and nonexistence.

"I think being dead would be easier," he says. He also worries that he hasn't been a good Muslim and might not end up in Paradise.

What could have turned into propaganda instead becomes a portrait of one child's understandably pragmatic reactions to extreme circumstances. When Mohammed's unemployed father tells him not to get shot in the back and become paralyzed (he's been throwing rocks at Israeli tanks), he seems less concerned for his son's safety than he is about whether the boy will be able to continue to provide the main support for his destitute family.

Longley makes no attempt to present the Israeli viewpoint, to show Palestinian destructiveness or to provide much in the way of a historical context. He's simply concerned with the cumulative impact of living under such conditions. Narrowing its focus so rigorously, "Gaza Strip" presents a most persuasive vision of hell on Earth.

Film Threat
Reviewed by: Phil Hall

The Gaza Strip is a fairly tiny place: it is only 28 miles long and four miles wide. It is also fairly crowded: 1.2 million Palestinians live here, and roughly one-third of the population reside in refugee camps. It is also home to 6,000 Israelis who have taken 30% of this area for themselves, complete with 24/7 security protection courtesy of the Israeli Defense Forces.

American filmmaker James Longley visited this area in January 2001 with the original plan of staying two weeks. He remained for three months and the result of his visit was "Gaza Strip," a brutally effective documentary which provides a very rare glimpse into the lives of the ordinary Palestinian people who live under Israeli military occupancy. At a time when the Holy Land is wobbling on the brink of civil war, "Gaza Strip" provides a tragic overview into the daily challenge to stay alive in a war zone.

Told without narration and staying clear of any commentary by Palestinian politicians, "Gaza Strip" begins its focus on a circle of teenage boys lead by a 13-year-old newspaper street vendor named Mohammed. These boys are the new fuel in the on-going intifada: unschooled, angry, living in poverty, responding with crude slingshots hurling broken bricks at Israeli tanks which fire back with live ammunition. Mohammed recalls how a young friend was fatally shot in the head even though he was not involved in an intifada riot (the slain boy was gathering scrap metal from a buffer zone between the Palestinians and Americans).

The film then travels throughout the Gaza Strip, offering sequences which could rival Bunuel or Fellini--with a touch of Costa-Gavras thrown in. A tranquil beach becomes polluted with automobiles, horse-drawn carts and pedestrians following the Israeli blockade of a main road. Helicopters hover in the twilight sky and send rockets into apartment complexes, illuminating the night with brilliant bursts of fiery light while explosions shower the streets with chunks and fragments of destroyed buildings.

Ambulances race furiously through ancient streets, bringing bloody adults and children into packed emergency rooms. An elderly woman, sitting in the drafty entrance of a refugee camp tent, tearfully recalls how the Israeli army bulldozed her house in retaliation for an attack on an illegal Israeli settlement in a neighboring town...an attack which the woman played no part in whatsoever. Victims of toxic gas canisters fired by Israeli troops writhe in convulsive pain on hospital beds, screaming at the top of their lungs while family and medical aides try vainly to restrain them. A child, no more than 10 years old, echoes the sentiments of his elders by happily chiming to the camera: "We want to beat back the Jews and kill them off" (and more than a few adults openly and joyfully share these sentiments with the camera).

As portrayed in this film, the Gaza Strip exists without any sense of Palestinian autonomy of self-government. No signs of the Palestinian Authority are anywhere to be seen, and even the youthful newspaper hawker Mohammed dismisses its leadership with the breathless comment: "Arafat is a spy -- he's taking it up the ass." The only leadership present here is medical: the tireless doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers and emergency medical technicians who face an endless skein of patients with an extraordinary variety of gunshot wounds, burns and mutilations from bombs (including, most horrifically, a dead child who innocently retrieved an Israeli bomb left as a booby trap in a pair of boxing gloves).

At no time does "Gaza Strip" present any Israelis; aside from the brief glimpses of military vehicles and the familiar blue-and-white flag fluttering behind barbed wire enclosures, the Israeli people do not exist in this film. Also absent from the film is a bit of balanced history: while Israel took military control of the Gaza Strip in 1967 following the Six-Day War, Egypt actually annexed the territory in 1948 in violation of the United Nations partition of the region and denied the Palestinian people their right to self-determination. No mention of Egypt's illegal occupation of this area is cited in this film.

Nonetheless, "Gaza Strip" deserves merit and attention for bringing the message of the Palestinian people to a camera and microphone. Nearly all of the current news coverage of the Middle East has focused on the military and political combatants in this never-ending conflict. By turning attention on the average people of the Gaza Strip, this film gives a face and voice to the seething population with a tragic and bitter story to tell. "Gaza Strip" is the rare vehicle which gives the Palestinian people (rather than their failed, double-talking leadership) an opportunity to speak freely and openly, and that feat in itself makes this one of the most important documentaries of recent times.

City Pages
Reviewed by: Peter S. Scholtes

The central figure in this riveting documentary, an illiterate Palestinian paperboy named Mohammed Hejazi, introduces himself to the camera in the early months of 2001. Like most young Gaza residents, he has grown up quickly: At age 13, he is the family's principal breadwinner. He says his father has struggled to find work since Israel closed the borders last year, after the second uprising began. The son admits to defying his parents and sneaking out to chuck stones at Israeli soldiers. He imagines death as a long debate with God over his sins of rock-throwing and stealing. He weeps over his best friend, whom he says was shot dead while nicking copper. Later we watch his cavalier reaction to the news, gleaned from pictures in the paper, that Sharon has been elected prime minister. "Egypt would fuck his father," he tells his pals. "And then Iraq would stand up." It's a tribute to the resilient gaze of director James Longley that you begin to care about this kid, to understand how chaos and fear have shaped his worldview. I wonder what has happened to him since the cameras shut off.

The Village Voice
reviewed by: J. Hoberman

Gaza Strip, a feature-length video by American filmmaker James Longley, is a documentary to make the stones weep — as shameful as it is scary. Longley spent three months during the  spring of 2001 in Gaza. Ariel Sharon had just won the Israeli election and the second intifada was now a fact of life.

The location is a chunk of misery: 1.2 million Palestinians penned up in a 28-by-four-mile slice of nowhere, further diminished by Israeli security installations and six fortified Jewish settlements. Longley's principal subject is a 13-year-old newsboy, Mohammed Hejazi, who is the main support of his family and whose main recreation is playing chicken with Israeli tanks—a game at which a number of his friends have already been killed. More than once, Longley shows hospital ERs filled with horribly wounded children.

No future here: Gaza Strip is even more painful in the knowledge that current conditions are worse. (Indeed, the tape was press-screened the morning after Israel liquidated Hamas terrorist Sheik Salah Shehada by dropping a bomb on his Gaza City apartment, killing another 14 people—mostly children—in an operation that Sharon moronically boasted was "one of our major successes.") Necessarily up on current events, Mohammed and his fellow newsboys are familiar with Sharon's particular brutishness. They naturally mock and hate Israeli politicians, albeit with scarcely more respect for the Palestinian Authority. "Arafat is a spy—he's taking it up the ass!"

Longley keeps his camera close to his subjects, backing off only to document quotidian atrocities ranging from tanks shelling helpless civilians to the bulldozing of Arab homes to the Israeli army's sickening use of an unidentified form of convulsion-causing gas. Made from the perspective of the
Arab on the street, Gaza Strip includes no footage of Jewish settlers or Israeli soldiers or even Palestinian security forces. (Nor is there any sort of historical context explaining the Arab responsibility for how Gaza got to be what it is.) It would be convenient to dismiss this as propaganda. But does it really matter if someone coached young Mohammed's claim that he wants to be a martyr or his dispassionate anticipation of his own death? "It would be easier," the kid says, and after seeing the wretched conditions that the movie documents, who will argue with
him?