This Palestinian Life 2009

Directed by Philip Rizk

In THIS PALESTINIAN LIFE, director Philip Rizk uses an oral history approach to highlight the stories and perspectives of Palestinian villagers and Bedouin. This method avoids using "experts" to interpret the broader Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Rather, the film's anthropological and ethnographic method portrays the daily life of Palestinian communities, in order to explore in greater depth how Palestinian life is being undermined by the pressure of Israeli occupation. Especially in Gaza, this style reveals the profound fragmentation of community life. The following stories are threaded together and interlaced to reveal the similarity of Israeli measures of occupation throughout Gaza and the West Bank, and the similarity of Palestinian reactions through sumoud – perseverance – to remain on the land.