Checkpoint (2003 film)

Checkpoint
Directed by	Yoav Shamir
Produced by	Amit Breuer Edna Kowarsky Elinor Kowarsky
Cinematography	Yoav Shamir
Edited by	Era Lapid
Release date	November 23, 2003 (2003-11-23) (Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival)
Running time	80 minutes
Country	Israel
Languages	Hebrew, Arabic, English

Checkpoint (original title: Machssomim) is a 2003 documentary film by Israeli filmmaker Yoav Shamir, showing the everyday interaction between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian civilians at several of the regions Israel Defence Forces checkpoints. The film won five awards at various film festivals, including Best International Documentary at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, best feature-length documentary at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam and the Golden Gate Award for Documentary Feature at the San Francisco International Film Festival. Although the film was generally well received, it was also controversial and reactions from audience members and critics were sometimes very angry.

Synopsis

Checkpoint is shot in cinéma vérité style with no narration and very little context. Shamir himself is absent from the film except for one scene in which a border guard asks him to try to make him "look good," and Shamir asks how he should do that.

The camera films people trying to cross at various checkpoints. At some, such as the high-tech fortress like that at the Gaza Strip crossing there are hundreds of people crowded, waiting to get through. At others such as at South Jenin there is just a truck blocking the road while Palestinians trickle by. Interactions vary, ranging from mundane to mildly frustrating to maddening in their unfairness. Sometimes people show their identification cards without incident but much of what Shamir has chosen to include are the messier incidences. A school bus full of kids (averaging around eight years old) the viewer sees several times and passes at South Jenin quite regularly (the bus driver says everyday) is emptied and told that it cannot proceed. A family is separated because a border guard does not see the need for the father to accompany his family to the doctor because he is not sick. A woman sends her crying children back home on their own because their papers are not in order. Hundreds ignore soldiers at one place and walk through to town, many carrying nothing but groceries. On the way to Nablus an ambulance is stopped and each passenger is forced to explain what their need for treatment is. A soldier calls Palestinians animals while they wait at Kalandia checkpoint in the snow. Sometimes the soldiers are obviously playing around with the people they are monitoring but often it seems that they are following arbitrary orders outside their control. The situation is only worsened by the fact that rarely does either party speak the same language: The entire film is spoken in patches of Arabic, Hebrew and English.

Awards

The film received five festival awards, including Best Feature Documentary at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, Best International Documentary at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival and the Golden Gate Award for Documentary Feature at the San Francisco International Film Festival.

Checkpoint and its Crucial Cinematic Role

Checkpoint as well as the other three transition site-premised films (Ben-Gurion: Gr’aad and Levenberg, 1997, Borders: Riklis & Kaydar, 2001 and Close, Closed, Closure: Directed and Written by Ram Loevy in 2003) has the unique narrative structure integral of the sub-genre “road movies” –focusing on point A to point B. These transition sites (i.e. airports, checkpoints and frontier posts) are thus, the center of the films’ events or journeys. As the transition site-premised films rely on transience between two points within a certain space rather than within a designated place, they have adopted the characteristic ‘placelessness.’ Furthermore, these sites –the Israeli checkpoints, specifically -indicate structural tension between being penetrable (passable) and impenetrable (impassable) thus creating a distinction between the “Us” and “Them” persons at the in-between spaces.+

Since there is a link to The Israeli gov. report as to Israeli fatalities there should be a link to contrary findings. The page seems to be locked. http://old.btselem.org/statistics/english/Casualties.asp

References

Zanger, Anat. "Blind Space: Roadblock Movies in the Contemporary Film." Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 24.1 (2005): 37-48. American University Library. Web.

External links

• Checkpoint at IMDb