Revisionist documentaries address historical quandaries, foregrounding issues and insights unavailable through conventional written historiography. In the case of Israel, this critical cinema has gradually come to haunt the Zionist metanarrative and has redefined the parameters of legitimate history.
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Juliano Mer-Khamis’ documentary Arna’s Children (2003), meanwhile, creates its own archive. Made over a period of ten years, Mer-Khamis chronicles the activism of his mother, Arna, a former Israeli Palmach fighter who married a Palestinian and who ultimately rejected the Zionist legacy.
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Arna’s Children paints a disheartening picture of the occupation, where violence, death, and hopelessness, along with determination and struggle, relentlessly haunt the waking lives of Palestinians, many of whom mourn the friends and relatives who have not survived. Far from being a sensationalist psychologist drama about the making of a terrorist, the film prods the spectator to identify with children whose dreams of normality in the midst of violence have taken them into the pre-scripted end of a tragedy.
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Critical documentaries, then, explore the imaging and imagining of the contested geography of “Palestine” and “Israel” in the wake of Western imperial expansion into what came to be called “the Middle East” as well as in the light of conflicting national desires.
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