Amos Gitai brings West Bank film to Venice: 'We live in shock at the savagery'

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The writer-director once called Israel’s ‘one-man New Wave’ is in Venice with The Road to Jericho, a new and poetic attempt to highlight the plight of those in the occupied West Bank

The Palestinian village of Khan al-Ahmar sits off dust-blown Highway-1, between Jerusalem and Jericho in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. At the village centre is the “school of tires”, a fragile construction of rubber, wood and adobe which is attended by around 300 Bedouin boys and girls. The Israeli authorities denied the villagers an official building permit and ruled that the entire settlement is illegal. For the past eight years the school has been operating under threat of imminent demolition, a symbol of resistance to widespread settler violence.

It is only international pressure, says the veteran Israeli writer-director Amos Gitai, that has kept the place upright and still open. “The school has become a litmus paper. It is a test of how far the international community will go [to protect the rights of the people of Khan al-Ahmar]. For once, on this issue, Europe stood up and said no.” As for the future, who can tell?

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