Can cinema verité set you free? A home-movie made under house arrest in Teheran, Jafar Panahi’s “This is Not a Film” documents one sort of imprisonment; “5 Broken Cameras,” a modest, first-person documentary produced by Palestinian photographer Emad Burnat and Israeli activist Guy Davidi in the West Bank town of Bi’lin records another sort of restraint.
Bi’lin, located two miles east of the Green Line and four miles west of Ramallah, has since the mid-aughts served as a stage for non-violent protest against the Israeli “protective barrier” that — in carving out space for the huge, high-rise settlement of Modi’in — effectively cut off the village from 90 percent of its ancestral farm land. “5 Broken Cameras,” which opens this week at Film Forum, is titled for and structured around the five digital recorders Burnat ran through in the course of documenting this ongoing, essentially non-violent struggle. Read the full review on Spotlight.