Da INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE di venerdì 4 marzo 2005 riportiamo l'articolo di Elisabetta Povoledo "An outsider's bold look at Gaza", sul film di Saverio Costanzo "Private":
Perhaps only an outsider could make a film about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that both sides can live with.
"You can't really be objective if you live in Israel or the territories; the temptation is always there to pull people to your side," said Lior Miller, who plays an Israeli commander in "Private," released in Italy last month. "But you can always see a situation from the middle. You just need to be an observer."
In the stated aims of its 29-year-old director, Saverio Costanzo, "Private" attempts to do just that.
Filmed with a digital camera that gives it a gritty, quasi-neorealist feel, the movie tells the story of the forced cohabitation of a family of Palestinians living in an isolated house halfway between Israeli settlements and an Arab village - the exact place is never specified - and a platoon of Israeli soldiers that arrives one night to commandeer their house.
The movie is a metaphor for the current situation in Israel, and while Costanzo acknowledges that there are "occupiers and the occupied," he wants the film to be more psychodrama than political pamphlet, having opted to explore the complicated gamut of human reactions and relationships that such tense circumstances can generate. Costanzo wanted the camera to be a neutral eye; both sides are victims of violence.
"One message of the film is that only through wisdom and culture can you undertake a dialogue that leads to peace," the director said during an interview in a café in Rome.
"Private" is based on a true story that Costanzo stumbled upon during a vacation in Israel, when a journalist introduced him to a Palestinian who has been living with Israeli soldiers on his roof since 1992. He stayed with the family for a few months and decided to script their story.
The decision taken recently by the Israeli government to evacuate the Jewish settlements in Gaza and part of the West Bank could now relegate the episode to history.
In life, and in the film, the Palestinian family is educated. The father, Mohammad, a pacifist, is a school principal and at home translates the works of Margaret Oliphant, a Victorian-era feminist. When the Israelis take over his house, he refuses to leave, for fear of losing his dignity and of igniting the flame of hatred against the Israelis in his five children.
The decision to stay in his house splits the family.
"To be a refugee is not being," Mohammad, who is played by the Palestinian actor Mohammad Bakri, says to his wife, Samiah (Areen Omari). She responds: "Are your principles more important than your children?"
The film won the top prize at the Locarno International Film Festival in Switzerland last summer, where Bakri also won the best actor award. Costanzo recently won the best new director prize given by the Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists. The film is scheduled to be distributed in at least 35 countries. So far there are no plans to distribute it in Israel, but Costanzo said that when it was shown last year at the Tel Aviv Cinemateque, it was well received.
In Italy, the film sparked some polemics when it was released because the Palestinian family was dubbed into Italian, while the Israelis speak Hebrew. Nearly all foreign films are dubbed here, and for some the choice not to dub the Israelis cast them into the "bad guys" mold, in the same cinematic tradition that gave the Nazis and Russians thick, harsh sounding accents.
"I think that if someone thinks that the Israelis are supposed to be shown as Nazis, then they haven't understood the film," Miller said of the dubbing controversy during a telephone interview. "But it isn't the important element of the film, where in any case the pictures are much stronger than words."
In other countries "Private" won't be dubbed. The actors speak Hebrew, Arab and English (the lingua franca).
The linguistic differences play an important role in fomenting the tension between the Israeli and Palestinian cohabitants. The film feeds on this tension, and Costanzo skillfully teases the audience with a succession of terse confrontations.
The director also stoked tensions between the Israeli and Palestinian actors, rehearsing with them separately and letting the camera roll when filming, allowing scenes to develop spontaneously and giving the actors the chance to self-direct.
"It was a very tense atmosphere, but it was a productive tension," said Bakri, who is the director of the controversial anti-Israeli film "Jenin, Jenin." It was a labor of love, not money, he added. "We Palestinians and Israelis worked together in the same film in order to give the message that there's hope to the end of the occupation."
"Private" was shot in Riace, Calabria, in southern Italy, during a four-week period. Initially Costanzo had wanted to shoot in Israel but decided it was too dangerous.
This is the first major film for Costanzo, the son of a powerful television personality, Maurizio Costanzo. He studied sociology of communications at the University of Rome, then lived in New York for two years, where he filmed a documentary in episodes called "Caffe Milleluci," which follows the vicissitudes of Italian immigrants in Brooklyn. He has also made a six-episode "docu-fiction" about emergency-room doctors and is currently working on a film about a Jesuit priest.
Not everyone agrees that Costanzo managed to stay politically neutral.
"Films like 'Private' belong to the European film school of antiglobalization politics. It is violently anti-Israeli, even beyond Palestinian positions," said Angelo Pezzana, whose Web site "Informazione Corretta" (Correct Information) tracks journalistic reporting about the Middle East. "One need only go to Israel to see the difference between propaganda and democracy."
But Costanzo insisted that no finger-pointing was involved. "There is no right after blood has been shed," he said.
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