How can one live in Gaza? How can one live in Sderot?
Every day, for two months, an Israeli video and a Palestinian video answered each other and shed light on each other: one without the other would have been incomplete, a mere fragment of reality. This is an attempt to convey how life is lived by men, women, and children on each side of the border. Their lives and survival, day by day. Under constant threat of air raids, bombings, of being surrounded, they continue to work, love, and dream. Life, in spite of everything.
We focused on the lives of ordinary people: a grocer, a high school student, a young musician, an ambulance driver, a hairdresser, a fisherman, etc… The ten characters whose lives we chose to share for these two months could be our neighbours, our friends, our acquaintances. Except that these people do not live under ordinary circumstances. These little fragments of daily life show how conflict affects the lives of these characters.
It is precisely the gaping hole between what’s normal and what isn’t that provides these videos with their brute force, their ability to trigger emotional responses and the need to know more.
The clips were shot, edited, and uploaded to the Internet overnight by the teams at Alma Films, Trabelsi Productions, the Sderot film school, and Ramattan Studio in Gaza.
Daily life in two cities on either side of the Israeli-Palestinian border. Every day, a 2-minute webisode allowed viewers to follow the lives of ten characters for two months. With the help of a specific narrative device and interface, Internet users enter the story through a map, a timeline, and keywords. They can thus get to know the daily lives of men and women intuitively and emotionally, and can even leave comments.
Given the predicament in which Israelis and Palestinians find themselves today, it has never been more important to give a voice to the citizens that live on both sides of the border.
Without a simple way to talk to each other in public, Internet has become an ideal forum to share testimonies and express points of view.
Israelis and Palestinians introduce us to their day to day lives, through videos broadcast on a daily basis, doing away with the logistical difficulties inherent in such a situation (tape transportation, etc.). Bo Travail !, Upian.com, and ARTE France ensured that the established dialogue could be sustained as smoothly as possible, by allowing it to resonate on an international stage. From the get go, the videos were available in five subtitled languages: French, German, English, and the original languages, Arabic and Hebrew.
The Gaza/Sderot videos elicit curiosity and the need to find out more; they provide means to deepen our understanding of the area’s current state of affairs.
The videos reach their full potential by touching upon several lines of interest:
- geographical (navigation by place)
- temporal (navigation by date)
- human (navigation by character)
- economic and geopolitical (local contextual information)
Invitations, shared videos, user comments, podcasts… Gaza/Sderot was also a forum for debate between Internet users and our characters, with Internet users of course being encouraged to send in their contributions: photos, videos, etc.
