Screening date: 25-11-2007 -- 21h00
En attendant Ben Gourion (Waiting for Ben Gurion)
Norma Marcos, French resident, was traveling from Paris to the Palestinian Territories to prepare her first feature film, Nouzha, which obtained the Grand Prix for best scriptwriter among 357 feature scripts. Upon arrival in Israel, she was put in prison at Ben Gurion Airport. Because of these incidents, she found herself stuck in her hometown of Bethlehem for seven weeks, unable to pursue her film shoot.
It was during these seven weeks that she had very intimate conversations with her niece who shared her vision of the concrete enclosure that had become part of her daily life.Throughout the film and especially the sequence of the wall there is a play between internal and external limitations and the perception of those limitations. The observer and that which is observed are no longer separate but become one. In the second reading, the film has little to do with the physical enclosure around Bethlehem and the director's imprisonment. The second reading of the film has more to do with how things are perceived, and the consequences of those ways of perceiving our lives.
This film is a call to awareness for thousands of European, American and Latin American citizens of Palestinian origin who have been either denied entry through Israeli ports or will be going through hell at Ben Gurion Airport each time they want to visit their family and friends, unlike any other citizens in free democratic countries. It is also a cry of alarm for an extraordinary number of foreigners who have been illegally denied entry through Israeli ports. Many of these foreign nationals have been turned away at the airport or bridges and sent back to their country of residence or to Jordan for no specific reason.
Country: Palestine
Production: Norma Marcos Tel: +33 (0)1 40 31 88 87
Year: 2006
Director: Norma Marcos
Editing: Keren Ben Rafaël, Menem Adwan, Julien Joyeux
Cinematography: Norma Marcos
Sound: Norma Marcos, Philippe Fabbri, Nicolas Delcroix
DigitalVideo – color – 30 min
back to film list
biography
Born in Bethlehem, Norma Marcos studied film directing. She began her career as assistant director working on numerous films before co-directing her first documentary in 1990, Bethlehem Under Surveillance. In 1994 she made The Veiled Hope, a documentary which explores the personal and political challenges facing Palestinian women through a series of women's portraits. Throughout her career she has regularly taken workshops perfecting her craft as a filmmaker and screenplay writer. She has also made several short documentary films.
