5 Broken Cameras (2011)
Line up: Anarchist Film Festival

5 Broken Cameras

Emad Burnat, Guy Davidi | 2011 | 90' | Arabic, Hebrew, EN subtitles 

Palestinian farm laborer Emad has five video cameras, and each of them tells a different part of the story of his village's resistance to Israeli oppression. Emad lives in Bil'in, just west of the city of Ramallah in the West Bank. Using the first camera, he recorded how the bulldozers came to rip the olive trees out of the ground in 2005. Here, a wall was built directly through his fellow villagers' land to separate the advancing Jewish settlements from the Palestinians.

In the first days of resistance to the Jewish colonists and the ever-present Israeli soldiers, Emad's son Gibreel was born. Scenes shift from the infant growing into a precocious preschooler to the many peaceful acts of protest, and the steady progress of the construction of the dividing wall. Sympathizers from all over the world, including from Israel, provide help as resistance develops, but when the situation intensifies, people are arrested and villagers are killed. Emad keeps on filming despite pleas from his wife, who fears reprisals. It makes for an intensely powerful personal document about one village's struggle against violence and oppression.

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Anarchist Group Amsterdam (AGA), in collaboration with Filmhuis Cavia, welcomes you back to the Amsterdam Anarchist Film Festival. Seven long years after our 2019 edition, we return with an exciting programme of films meant to bring hope, anger, joy and a call to action against an ever more absurd and crumbling capitalist reality that drifts into the future on the waves of war, genocide, environmental destruction and the looming rise of techno-fascism.

From December 4th to 6th at Filmhuis Cavia, we seek to create an oasis of resistance with screenings, talks and discussions meant to build solidarity, community and nourishment for the soul and mind. Our selection of films will explore varied topics: from critiques of patriarchal norms and historical anarchist struggles to absurd loops of gender-bending fun and postcolonial malaise.


FULL PROGRAMME→