Central Cinema is pleased to be teaming up with Jewish Voice for Peace Knoxville to present this stirring, Oscar-winning documentary about life under occupation, displacement and apartheid in Palestine’s West Bank. (The film’s run will kick off with a special event screening Sunday April 27 featuring a panel discussion from JVP and free snacks courtesy of the Highlander Center; additional screenings follow throughout the next week.)

Basel Adra, a young Palestinian activist from Masafer Yatta, has been fighting his community’s mass expulsion by the Israeli occupation since childhood. Basel documents the gradual erasure of Masafer Yatta, as soldiers destroy the homes of families – the largest single act of forced transfer ever carried out in the occupied West Bank. He crosses paths with Yuval, an Israeli journalist who joins his struggle, and for over half a decade they fight against the expulsion while growing closer. Their complex bond is haunted by the extreme inequality between them: Basel, living under a brutal military occupation, and Yuval, unrestricted and free. This film, by a Palestinian-Israeli collective of four young activists, was co-created during the darkest, most terrifying times in the region, as an act of creative resistance to Apartheid and a search for a path towards equality and justice.

“As an act of citizen journalism, it’s a document as damning as they come, and it lands in this endless, bitterly complex struggle like an argument that refuses to be rationalized away.” – Washington Post

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