When you have half a dozen interviews to edit and splice together with documentary footage from several decades of history, obviously objectivity is not going to happen. What you select, how long you dwell on it, and even how you put a sound track to the footage-- subjectivity enters into it all. There's also what you don't say. For example when an interviewee laments that Hamas spoiled the peace that the PLO and Israel were building, no one appears on screen to remind the audience of PLO-sponsored hate indoctrination and terror attacks. However, the film is not pure anti-Israeli propaganda, and to the extent that it presents the interviewees' view of recent history as a series of lost opportunities for peace, we may disagree with the interviewees but it appears we can trust the filmmaker that they did say what we hear. Meanwhile, we're still waiting for Israeli filmmakers to create, and for Hollywood distributors to embrace, a political movie that depicts Israel with less than an overdose of self-criticism.
Review of The Gatekeepers
