(74 minutes)
USA/Palestine
Director/Producer: James Longley
GAZA STRIP presents the lives and views of ordinary Palestinians which we do not have the chance to see in the daily news. Mohammed Hejazi, a 13-year-old paperboy in Gaza City, regularly risks his life throwing rocks at Israeli tanks across the barbwire fences. As the newspapers are delivered announcing Ariel Sharon's victory in the Israeli elections, Mohammed offers up tirades against Arafat and Sharon alike. The Palestinians interviewed as they pass by reveal a common internal conflict, between anger at the Israeli occupation and the desire to live in peace. In the Khan Younis refugee camp, GAZA STRIP documents an extremely controversial incident, which fell largely through the cracks of international scrutiny, when the Israeli Defense Forces used an unidentified, powerful gas during a firefight, hospitalizing over 200 Palestinians with severe recurrent convulsions. Inside a Red Cross tent near an Israeli checkpoint, a Palestinian mother and daughter debate the politics of their situation. As night falls on their camp, the mother describes how Israeli soldiers came with bulldozers, leveled their home and destroyed all of their belongings.
James Longley was born in the Oregon in 1972 and studied film at the University of Rochester and Wesleyan University in the United States, and the Russian Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) in Moscow. James received the Student Academy Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his short documentary, Portrait of Boy with Dog, about a boy in a Moscow orphanage. GAZA STRIP is his first feature documentary.
James Longley
E-mail: james_longley@yahoo.com
URL: www.littleredbutton.com/gaza
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