Veteran Israeli director Amos Gitai brings The Road to Jericho to the Venice Film Festival, a haunting documentary that highlights the plight of a Bedouin village in the occupied West Bank. The film centres on the "school of tires" in Khan al-Ahmar, a fragile structure of rubber, wood and adobe attended by around 300 Bedouin children, which has operated under threat of demolition for eight years.
The Israeli authorities have denied the villagers an official building permit and ruled the settlement illegal. According to Gitai, only international pressure has kept the school 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."
A Director's Civic Gesture
Gitai, once dubbed "Israel's one-man New Wave" by critic Michael Atkinson, blends a documentary portrait of the school with archival footage from the past 40 years, including clips from his 2001 drama Eden and interviews with Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin from the Oslo accords era. Reflecting on Rabin's assassination in 1995, Gitai says, "The killing of Rabin decapitated the efforts to create a dialogue. Rabin was very simple, very sober. He wanted an agreement and was prepared to put all the questions on the table and discuss them [because he knew that] you cannot force an agreement."
Gitai describes the current moment as "the worst time I've known in my life. Everything has been destabilised and we are now in the hands of people who don't want peace, whether it's extreme-right settlers or Hamas. Many of us in Israel have been living these last three years in a state of shock at the levels of violence and savagery we are seeing." He first visited Khan al-Ahmar while shooting another film 10 years ago and was moved by the community's perseverance. "I wanted to use film-making to defend the school," he says.
Art and Hope
The Road to Jericho is one of several Middle East-focused films at this year's Venice festival, including NAZA, a Guardian co-production in the main competition, and Raj'in (We Shall Return), a VR documentary in the Venice Immersive section. Gitai, however, describes his work as a "civic gesture" and is wary of films with a clear agenda. "I don't believe art changes reality," he says. "What art can do is scratch a memory – and that's important. Machine guns and money move the world, but so do ideas. And cinema is a great vessel for ideas."
In his 1982 documentary Field Diary, Gitai interviewed Bassam Shakaa, the then-mayor of Nablus, who had lost a leg in an attack by Israeli settlers. When asked if he was an optimist or pessimist, Shakaa replied, "Pessimism is a luxury we cannot afford." Gitai reflects, "I don't know if I'm an optimist. That would be a naive thing to say when we see everything that's going on. But look at Europe 80 years ago – the stage for the killing of millions and millions of people – and it's a good historical reference. It shows that people can always still come together and reconstruct, even after the horror of the second world war. So you have to preserve hope. Hope and ideas – these are the great motors for change."
