Chroniques de Palestine

In September 2000, the filmmaker set out to film images for his documentary on how the Palestinian and Jewish communities were experiencing the peace process. Then, mid-shoot, events took an unexpected turn. The reality of the Intifada at Al-Aqsa suddenly exceeded the fiction of applying the Oslo Agreements. North of Ramallah, the main characters, Nina and Ossama, their parents, relatives and friends express their thoughts, their disarray, their worries. “Day after day, the sadness of people and places becomes palpable. It is important to keep a lucid view and convey the suffering of an entire people without falling into the trap of pathos. My work involves restituting life and death as I experience them at a given moment. Offering clues, refraining from hasty judgements that would inevitably be highly simplistic. On that basis, the immense generosity of Nina, Ossama and all the others will hopefully have enabled me to draw a faithful portrait of these premonitory events and their direct consequences, in the light of the outcome that we see today.” (Pierre Bastien)