Agenda Item: Erasure

Documentarian Ra'anan Alexandrowicz accompanies a Palestinian tour group on a three-day sight-seeing trip to Israel.

An Israeli film director interviews fellow veterans of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon to reconstruct his own memories of his term of service in that conflict.

After World War II, 4,000 Polish families came to Australia. They were Jews, Fascists, anti-Communists, and others dispossessed. In a large hostel, where even married men and women were housed in separate barracks, the adults lived for two years while they worked off the government's payment of their passage. Even though he is married to Anna and has a son, Julian falls in love with Nina and she with him. As they and others face the new situations and prejudices that await immigrants and as they take on aspects of Australian culture, old-country values reassert themselves. Julian decides what to do about love and family, and Nina must find a way to move on.

This feature-length documentary by Alanis Obomsawin examines the plight of Native people who come to Montreal searching for jobs and a better life. Often arriving without money, friends or jobs, a number of them quickly become part of the homeless population. Both dislocated from their traditional values and alienated from the rest of the population, they are torn between staying and returning home.

The Israeli filmmaker Shai Corneli Polak records the building of the 'security wall' through Palestinian territory at the village of Bil'in. The villagers protest mostly peacefully, while the Israeli army doesn't react peacefully. By now the Israeli High Court has ruled that the building of the wall was illegal.

Three children living in a displacement camp in northern Uganda compete in their country's national music and dance festival.

A look at the work of Israel's controversial former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

A documentary about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that has lasted for more than 50 years. Contains some interviews with the children in this conflict.

The tape-recorded words “erase it” take on new weight in the context of history and war. When the state of Israel was established in 1948, war broke out and hundreds of Palestinian villages were depopulated in its aftermath. Israelis know this as the War of Independence. Palestinians call it “Nakba” (the Catastrophe). In the late 1990s, graduate student Teddy Katz conducted research into a large-scale massacre that had allegedly occurred in the village of Tantura in 1948. His work later came under attack and his reputation was ruined, but 140 hours of audio testimonies remain.

Prominent Columbia University English and Comparative Literature professor Edward Said was well known in the United States for his tireless efforts to convey the plight of the Palestinian people, and in this film shot less than a year before his death resulting from incurable leukemia, the author of such books as {-Orientalism}, {-Culture and Imperialism}, and {-Power, Politics, and Culture} discusses with filmmakers his illness, his life, his education, and the continuing turmoil in Palestine. Diagnosed with the disease in 1991, Said struggled with his leukemia throughout the 1990s before refraining from interviews due to his increasingly fragile physical state. This interview was the one sole exception to his staunch "no interview" policy, and provides fascinating insight into the mind of the man who became Western society's most prominent spokesman for the Palestinian cause.

Originally edited in two versions. Version I, 70 minutes; version II, 90 minutes. (The only known existing version is not Markopoulos’s edit and contains additional titles, music and voice-over added later than 1961. 65 minutes.) Filmed in Mytilene and Annavysos, Greece, 1958. Existing copy on video, J. and M. Paris Films, Athens.

The painful personal stories of five Palestinian kids, ages 7-17, open a window into the world of Palestinian minors under Israeli occupation - trapped within the violence, humiliation, and daily confrontations with soldiers and settlers - while remaining children in every way. Each child finds his or her own way to cope and to construct emotional and political worlds in an impossible situation.

Millions of American Evangelicals are praying for the State of Israel. This film traces this unusual relationship, from rural Kentucky to the halls of government in Washington, through the moving of the American Embassy in Jerusalem and to the annexation plan of the West Bank.

When two young American Jews raised to unconditionally love Israel witness the mistreatment of Palestinians, they battle the old guard to create a new movement opposing Israel’s occupation, and recentering Judaism itself.

This short documentary chronicles a four-month period between 1979 and 1980 when residents of Hawaii's Sand Island "squatter" community attempted to resist eviction from the Honolulu shoreline - resulting in displacement, arrests, and the destruction of a community.

The inside story of the bitter clash between President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. Amid violence in the Middle East, the film traces Netanyahu's rise to power and his high-stakes fight with the president over Iran's nuclear program.

Some 40 years after setting foot in Israel for the first time, journalist Pierre Nadeau felt the desire to return there to take stock of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

How US politicians and diplomats, over the past 25 years, have come close to achieving something almost impossible: securing peace between the State of Israel and its Arab and like-minded neighbors, mired in a struggle both dialectical and violent since the early 20th century, due to historical and religious reasons, entrenched offenses and prejudices, and the invisible and tyrannical hand of third countries' geopolitical interests in the area.

The story of the Israeli military assault on Gaza. Seen through the eyes of children, journalists and doctors, Dispatches takes an unflinching look at the horrific challenges and heartbreaking loss. Made by 12 Palestinian film-makers who risked their lives to depict the ongoing assault, this documentary confronts us with the loss and suffering of people whose gaze we have met.

On the eve of the Israeli attack on Egypt in 1956, Israel declares martial law in all the occupied Arab territories without any previous notice. When the villagers of Kafr Kassem returned home from the fields, they were butchered and killed in what is known today as the massacre of “Kafr Kassem”.