United Screens for Palestine: 5 Broken Cameras (Nekkersdal X Needcompany)

Date: Tuesday 4 February 2025
Location: MILL

Screening '5 Broken Cameras':
Emad Burnat & Guy Davidi (2011)
94 minutes | Subtitles: English and Dutch

Prior to the film screening, Palestinian volunteers from Nekkersdal will be providing a delicious hot meal (5 euros).

Meals served from 6.30 pm
Introduction starts at 7.30 pm
Screening starts promptly at 8 pm

We work on a first-come first-served basis, so FULL = FULL or GONE = GONE

On Tuesday 4 February 2025, Needcompany will welcome Nekkersdal to MILL for the first time. A collaboration prompted by renovation works at Nekkersdal. For this first collaboration, the Needcompany studio will be transformed into a cinema, in which the impressive documentary ‘5 Broken Cameras’ will be screened as part of United Screens for Palestine* and Refusing to disappear**.

5 Broken Cameras
Emad Burnat, a Palestinian farmer from Bil’in, purchases his first camera in 2005 when his fourth son is born. What begins as an attempt to capture pleasant family memories gradually evolves into a powerful account of a personal and collective conflict when his village is impacted by Israeli evictions. Burnat captures the tensions between villagers and Israeli soldiers, revealing the impact of the Israeli oppression on his own family. As his family suffers from daily arrests and night-time raids, his cameras are repeatedly damaged by the outbursts of violence around him.
 

Jan Lauwers: If you walk along the wall on the West Bank, you feel a prison-like claustrophobia. You feel the gloom of a hopeless situation. The graffiti on the burnt-out car wrecks that serve as grim witnesses to its unliveablity.

If you study the map, you see the staggering naivety of a two-state solution. Too much time has passed, and things have gone far too far.

During my walk along the wall, I saw a giant graffiti portrait of Nelson Mandela and was unable to suppress a smile. The graffiti artist had not depicted Mandela, but Hollywood star Morgan Freeman who once played Mandela. Did the artist do this deliberately? Is he saying with this that all news about Palestine has become false? Ground up in the mill of superficial entertainment? That it no longer matters whether an image aims to be truthful because truth no longer exists? 

The film ‘5 Broken Cameras’ centres around this painful question. The film is now 15 years old, and its theme is more important than ever. Too many truth-seekers and fact checkers are shut down by a cynical apparatus of oppression. Not only on the West Bank. All over the world. We are worried about AI taking over our lives, but for the majority of Palestinians, their life has already been taken over. And we simply look on. This film is a powerful call not to look away.

 

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Date: Tuesday 4 February 2025
Location: MILL

Screening '5 Broken Cameras':
Emad Burnat & Guy Davidi (2011)
94 minutes | Subtitles: English and Dutch

Prior to the film screening, Palestinian volunteers from Nekkersdal will be providing a delicious hot meal (5 euros).

Meals served from 6.30 pm
Introduction starts at 7.30 pm
Screening starts promptly at 8 pm

We work on a first-come first-served basis, so FULL = FULL or GONE = GONE

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