Screens/Movies

Where: Hot Docs Festival
What: Movie, 90 mins.
When: Tues., April 30 (10 am) Scotiabank, Thurs., May 2 (8 pm) TIFF Lightbox
Genre: Documentary
Rating: NNNN (out of 5)
Why you should watch: Young Palestinian filmmaker Mohamed Jabaly left his Gaza home in 2014 as an invited guest to attend a film festival in a small Norwegian town above the Arctic Circle. When Israel slams the border shut in his Gaza homeland, Jabaly will spend the next seven years trying to get home. While in Norway, Jabaly finishes what will be an award-winning film, Ambulance, that features raw footage filmed while Jabaly served as a volunteer ambulance driver saving lives during Israel’s brutal 2012 bombing of Gaza. His earlier film shows the explicit brutality of Israel’s indiscriminate bombing and bloodletting while in his latest film, Jabaly demonstrates the quieter, crushing way Israel controls Palestinians lives, able to arbitrarily keep families apart, cut off resources and institutionally humiliate Palestinians. It is heartening to see the small Norwegian town rally in support of Jabaly and his efforts to get a visa to remain in Norway until the border to Gaza re-opens and he can return home. As a Palestinian, Jabaly’s “stateless” status complicates his efforts to operate within the Norwegian immigration system when, all the while, he desperately just wants to get home. Your heart will break just a little more seeing yet another way Palestinians are institutionally oppressed with Jabaly’s relentlessly optimistic approach offering hope and an insight into the resilience practised by so many of his country people at home and in the diaspora.