Under a blue sun - how images can hide ethnic cleansing
This article was first published in The Prisma Multicultural Newspaper on November 25th 2024, where the full text can be read with its associated images: https://theprisma.co.uk/2024/11/25/under-a-blue-sun-how-images-can-hide-ethnic-cleansing/
Lawfare and alternative facts are used to change the landscape. A Palestinian special effects man who worked on his own family’s land, expropriated by the Israeli military and then rented to Hollywood film producers, became friends with an Israeli filmmaker. Boycotts of Israeli companies need to be careful to avoid furthering the aims of their opponents.
Graham Douglas
The film Rambo III was a fiction set during the soviet invasion of Afghanistan, featuring a people’s hero Rambo, fighting to expel them. In 1988 it was the most expensive film ever made, and it was actually filmed in Israel’s Negev desert, through a profitable collaboration between Hollywood and the Israeli military.
Daniel Mann is an Israeli academic and filmmaker who has lived in London for 12 years. He brings an interest in ecology to bear on the issue of filmmaking.
What emerged from collaboration with his Palestinian friend was the film “Under a Blue Sun”, named in contrast to the way the sunsets in Rambo III were intensified with red filters.
Film festivals in some countries are intimidated into not showing films critical of the Israeli apartheid state and its abuse of Palestinians. He has been the target of right-wing trolls from Israel.
The ancient legal tradition that unworked land belongs to no-one is used in Brazil by the MST (Movimento Sem Terras) to occupy empty land owned by large companies, and was a slogan of Emiliano Zapata. In Israel, land occupied or not, can be declared as required by the army, with no legal process, houses demolished and families living there expelled at gunpoint.
Mann discusses the issue of Israeli funding for cinema and argues that the BDS movement (Boycot Divestment Sanctions) needs to recognise the complexities.
His film received the main award at Documenta Madrid, and he used it to support Palestinian Bedouins communities. I spoke to him for The Prisma at Doclisboa.