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| The Inner Tour |
by Ra'anan Alexandrowicz
prod. Liran Atzmor & Noemi Schory
Belfilms/Dar Films
Palestine/Israel 2001, 97 min.
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A bus tour in Israel. The passengers are Palestinians from the since 1967 occupied West Bank. They travel through the country they are formally residing in, a country they hardly know, yet which is very present in their day to day lives.
The Inner Tour tells the story of a group of tourists on a visit to their homeland. Filmed in 1999, just months before the current Mideast clashes erupted, it recounts the adventures of a group of West Bank Palestinians taking a three-day sightseeing tour of Israel. And it is a simple human tale of a weekend jaunt across the border that becomes an unfinished journey traversing time and crisscrossing between the nostalgic recollections of a vanished past and the harsh realities of the present day. The heroes of this film are the tourists themselves, most of whom have never been to Israel before, while the ones who had came under less-than-positive circumstances. As they make their way across the country, the landscape seems familiar but foreign, threatening but thrilling. This rush of attitudes and emotions is reflected in their very eyes. This is their homeland, but they are visiting as tourists. This is the state that has occupied them for decades, but it is also a country, just like any other, with people not very different from them. Their observations and encounters as tourists with the country they are visiting, and their interactions, both between themselves and within themselves, lie at the heart of this film, which paints a unique and complex portrait of one of the world's most tangled national conflicts.
Berlin Forum, Edinburgh, IDFA, Vancouver, Dokfest Munich, Sundance, New Directors New Films New York, Singapur, San Francisco, Buenos Aires, Seattle, Florida, Karlovy Vary, a.m.o
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