Page - 114 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 05/01

returns with his critical voice on the Israeli-Palestinian space with his West of the Jordan River. In searching for how the conflict might be resolved, Gitai deconstructs hierarchical authoritarianism and extremism by framing the film within the idea of peace, as embodied by the political figure of Yitzhak Rabin, with whom the film starts and finishes. In framing West of the Jordan River with the “peace narrative”, Gitai raises a variety of political issues within the cinematic space. Gitai’s critical approach is by no means limited to Israelis’ views on the state and politics of identity. He also investigates the living experience of war, peace and religious extremism in all strands of society, including amongst Palestinians. West of the Jordan River contains both a balance and a contradiction between characters and environment. The balance stems from the director’s equal divi- sion between segments that navigate across Israel’s geography and segments that contain interviews with people of different ethnic, religious and socio-polit- ical backgrounds. The contradictions are captured by the camera when people and images emerge in physical spaces where they are not expected or where the personal story interrupts the peaceful geographical scenery where it is told: the first such example is the “1994 Erez Checkpoint” section, which shows closed checkpoints, armed soldiers and diverted traffic and a boy wandering with a bowl of strawberries (fig. 3); the second is “A Boy on a Terrace” (fig. 4), where the peaceful imagery of a sunny terrace in Hebron is distorted by the story of a boy who wants to become a martyr (in both cases, innocence is inter- rupted by socio-political reality and conflictual circumstances). Fig. 3: Checkpoint. Film still, West of the Jordan River (Amos Gitai, IL/FR 2017), 00:08:01. 114 | Milja Radovic www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/1