Five Broken Cameras

Emad Burnat, a farmer in Bil’in village in the West Bank, starts using his first video camera on the birth of his fourth son. At that time, Israel is building a wall through the village land to separate it from a future Israeli colony to house 150,000 people. Edited with the help of the Israeli documentarist Guy Davidi, Five Broken Cameras is valuable as much for its highly original content as for the relentless perseverance of the man holding the camera. By filming political events and family intimacy on an equal footing, Emad Burnat shows from the inside how bellicose masculinity and a spirit of resistance are forged (“army” is one of the first words his baby pronounces). These sometimes very violent images, filmed over a five-year span, document the advance of the colonized territories and the escalating repression. The cameras referred to in the title were damaged in the albeit non-violent demonstrations in Bil’in, and are favourite targets for soldiers, but they also protect Emad’s face. They soon become the synecdoches for his palimpsest-body: death prowls in ever-closer circles around a man who “films to heal his scars”.