History of Israeli Cinema Part 2

"During the period covered in part 1 of this history, Israeli filmmakers tended to focus on the dream of their country. Part 2 picks up in 1979, when they were starting to explore the gap between the dream and reality. Films like 1982's Chamsin began taking a sympathetic look at Palestinians, breaking with the conventions of Israeli cinema that treated Arabs the way American westerns treated Indians, as the default bad guys. “We were much closer to peace in 1984 than we are now,” says the actor and filmmaker Mohamed Bakri, who played a Palestinian freedom fighter in the 1984 prison drama Beyond These Walls. The Israeli cinema of the eighties was full of Romeo and Juliet stories between Jews and Arabs. A dialogue between the two cultures...