Film News: The Law In These Parts
With several major Jewish and mainstream film festivals going on right now, there’s a lot of film news coming in – our film grantees are all over the place, and its great to see that audiences everywhere are appreciating their work as much as we do. We’re very pleased to be represented at Sundance for the second consecutive year: here’s a spotlight on this year’s entrant, The Law in These Parts.
Filmmaker Ra’anan Alexandrowicz
The Law in These Parts (LITP) received a grant from the Kroll Fund for Jewish Doc Film in 2010, in 2011 it premiered, and now in 2012 it’s at Sundance and making headlines. It’s a film beautifully conceived and executed – a challenging film, no doubt, but an important one. We couldn’t be more excited to see the amount of great attention it’s gotten, and we’re proud to have been a part of its creation.
The New York Times featured LITP in its OP-DOCS series, with an op-ed by filmmaker Ra’anan Alexandrowicz paired with an original mini-doc. Click for link. (OP-DOCS is a forum for short, opinionated documentaries, produced with creative latitude by independent filmmakers and artists.)
New York Review of Books wrote up LITP on its blog as part of a series on democracy in different parts of the world:
Indiewire interviewed Ra’anan Alexandrowicz as part of a series on the filmmakers at Sundance this year: Meet the 2012 Sundance Filmmakers #22: Ra’anan Alexandrowicz
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency (better known as JTA) said the following in its review:
The film is an interrogation — literally — of the military-run legal system of justice that Israel established in the West Bank and Gaza Strip following the 1967 Six-Day War. Made by Ra’anan Alexandrowicz, whose previous works include “The Inner Tour” and “James’ Journey to Jerusalem,” the movie consists almost entirely of interviews with the Israelis, now quite old, who had established the system and run it over the years.
Some of the revelations are shocking. One judge acknowledges that “of course” he knew about torture, contradicting the findings of various Israeli investigative commissions. Alexandrowicz takes us inside the meetings where they developed the legal justifications for controversial practices such as indefinite detentions and land confiscation for settlements.
Where “Five Broken Cameras” has the rough urgency of its hand-held production, “The Law in These Parts” is calm and methodical, its critical perspective unfolding in a slow, patient manner. The film, which won top documentary honors last July at the Jerusalem Film Festival, is evenhanded in that it gives Israel full credit for its painstaking efforts to create a consistent set of rules in the areas it conquered in the ’67 war. But the film also suggests that Israel’s legal system, while it may have tempered some of the worst abuses of military occupation, also legitimized many others.
In addition to these two films that focus directly on Israel, others at Sundance have Jewish themes or origins.
The Law in These Parts has also been mentioned in a whole slew of other publications including: Newsweek Magazine, The Onion’s AV Club, Cinemascope, Filmmaker Magazine, The Jewish Daily Forward, The Jerusalem Post, and Haaretz. Kenneth Turan, film critic for the LA Times and a past panelist for our film fund, named it one of his Sundance picks.
The film still has screenings left at Sundance, and it’s likely to continue making the rounds at film festivals for some time to come, so if you don’t happen to be in Utah at the moment, keep an eye on your local listings!
