Nida Sinnokrot
Palestine Blues
Screens: Sunday April 1st at 4:00 PM
Director's Filmography
Palestine Blues (2005)
Director's Statement
When I first began filming in Palestine during the summer of 2002, I was recording my daily commute through Qallandiya checkpoint, the only passage connecting my home in Ramallah to Jerusalem. All the while, I was scouting locations for a landscape project I wanted to make on the subterranean politics of water. My days consisted of crossing a checkpoint and, with the access afforded me by my American passport, driving to a farming village in the water rich region of the West Bank. I brought Blues music for my drives, which later became the sound track of the film.
Shortly after driving into Jayyous, one of the first villages I had set out to explore, I bore witness to the start of Israel's construction of its Separation Barrier. The villagers, whose lands were being lost to this wall, implored me to document their story; at that time there was no one else around with a video camera. Israel's Wall, & the resistance movement against it, became the thread that wove my original themes of checkpoints & changing landscapes together.
