‘I must document everything’: the film about the Palestinian photographer killed by missiles in Gaza

Fatma Hassouna used poetry and photography to record the death and devastation she saw daily. Was she targeted by the IDF? We speak to the director of Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, a film about the journalist Israel has sought to pursue its campaign of annihilation against Gaza and its people behind closed doors. More than 170 Palestinian journalists have been killed so far, and no outside reporters or cameras are allowed in. The effects of this policy of concealment – which the Guardian managed to pierce this week with a shocking aerial photograph that made the front page – are to ensure that the outside world only catches sight of Gaza’s horrors in small fragments, and to stifle empathy for those trapped inside by hiding them from view, obscuring their humanity. But a new documentary film, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, seeks to open a window to the unfathomable suffering inside Gaza. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/OQNX6g1 via IFTTT

The Six Billion Dollar Man review – WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s rise, fall and limbo

Cannes film festival
Focusing on the rogue’s gallery of hypocrites and crooks surrounding him, Assange himself is in the background of a pretty definitive examination

Julian Assange sits at the centre of this gripping account of the WikiLeaks founder’s rise, fall and protracted seven-year limbo inside the Ecuadorian embassy. Eugene Jarecki’s documentary takes its title from the price the incoming Ecuadorian government supposedly charged the Trump administration for helping furnish his extradition to the US, thereby reneging on a promise of political asylum. If The Six Billion Dollar Man doesn’t rebuild Assange, exactly, that’s because it’s more interested in comprehensively demolishing his enemies. Compared to the hypocrites, scoundrels and crooks who surround him, the man himself looks almost virtuous.

Actually Assange is mostly a background presence here. He’s more talked about than talking up; a karmic victim of his own success. While even his supporters admit to his personal failings (arrogance, cruelty, bouts of megalomania), the film asks us to regard him as a messenger shot down by bigger, darker forces; a man whose only real crime was publishing inconvenient truths. The Swedish rape charge, it argues, was largely cooked up as a means of delivering him to the US authorities, so that they in turn could charge him with violating the Espionage Act. “Julian Assange is not an angel carved in marble,” says the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden (no angel himself). “But he’s not a vial of poison either.”

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