Route 181 – fragments d’un voyage en Palestine-Israël

Route 181 offers an unusual vision of the inhabitants of Palestine-Israel, a common vision of a Palestinian and an Israeli. For more than a year, Michel Khleifi and Eyal Sivan have devoted themselves to producing what they consider a cinematic act of faith: a film co-directed by a Palestinian and an Israeli. In the summer of 2002, for two long months, they travelled together from the south to the north of their country, traced their itinerary on a map and called it Route 181. This virtual line follows the borders outlined in the United Nations Resolution 181 of November 29th 1947 clling for the partition of Palestine into two states. As they travel along this route, they meet women and men, Israeli and Palestinians, young and old, civilians and soldiers’ filming them in their everyday lives. Each of these characters has their own way of evoking the frontiers that separate them from their neighbours: concrete, barbed wire, cynicism, humour, indifference, suspicion, aggression’ Frontiers have been built on hills and plains, on mountains and in valleys but above all inside the minds and souls of these two peoples and in the collective unconscious of both societies.