Un argentino in Palestina

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Note of intent

This film starts with the discovery of old rolls of film in the Cuban Cinemateca. From that point the film relates fragments of the newly-discovered film, Palestine: another Viet Nam (1971), made by a guerrilla film-crew in Palestine and that was considered lost forever, with the filmmaker’s memory and footage, shot from the start of the War on Terror in 2001 . This is a film about a shared memory of resistance between Latin America and Palestine, and the historical links between the two. The filmmaker’s 10 year journey into the arab-israeli conflict articulates his experience of resistance in Latin America with that of the Palestinians he meets, from a uniquely personal viewpoint.

Synopsis

Rodrigo Vázquez is an Argentine that has worked as a war correspondent in the Arab-Israeli war front for 12 years. He documented the horrors of that war not only from the point of view of the anonymous civilian victims, but also from the perspective of the Islamic militiamen and the generals, soldiers and officers of the Israeli Army. In October 2006, Rodrigo began to feel the first symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He left his work in the area of Gaza and returned home to confront the memory of what he’d seen. He had difficulties sleeping, felt depressed, had panic attacks. Now that he’s condition is cured, Rodrigo wants to return to Gaza to wrap a journey he began 12 years ago, at the beginning of the so-called war on terror against islamic extremists. .This time, it’ll be not a fact-finding trip, but a private, intimite human journey to the many people he’s met during a decade of war. This film takes a unique look at the war in Israel-Palestine through life-stories that span a decade from a Latin American viewpoint. In doing so it reveals a hidden threat that links the fates of both Latin America and the Middle East.

Visual concept

There are four layers of memory in this film: the footage of the 1960’s and 70’s resistance, the footage shot by the filmmaker between 2001-2005 in Gaza , the footage shot when Hamas took power in Gaza in 2007 and the present day footage which includes Cuba and Bolivia as key locations. Each has its own texture given the time and format used (footage spans more than a decade) and relates to the other layers through the use of exact same locations and camera angles in different periods of time. At the centre of this vision is the passage of time, which is an essential dramatic element in the story. The footage has a film-diary quality that will be edited “a la Chris Marker”.