West of the Jordan River

Israeli director Amos Gitai’s 2017 documentary is subtitled "Field Diary Revisited," pointing back to his 1982 nonfiction film Field Diary, which proved to be so controversial that Gitai was forced to leave his homeland for a decade. Like that earlier effort, this follow-up is essentially a road trip through the occupied West Bank, with special emphasis on the city of Hebron, where Gitai talks to people about current conditions and their hopes and dreams for the future. Periodically, he also inserts excerpts from talking-head interviews with journalists and politicians regarding the Israeli occupation, which run the gamut of opinion—from demands that it end to defenses of the current policy of expanding settlements and building walls. Some of the conversations are rancorous, while others—like one in which a Palestinian boy cheerfully maintains his wish to become a martyr in jihad against Israel despite Gitai’s insistence that life is better than death—are deeply sad. Interviews with a group of disillusioned Israeli veterans and with members of a support group for Israeli and Palestinian mothers who have lost children in the conflict point toward a yearning for reconciliation. Gitai signals his own rueful attitude about the possibility of progress by bookending the film with excerpts from a 1994 interview with Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the soldier-turned-statesman who initiated the peace process and insisted it would not be derailed (Rabin was assassinated the following year). Recommended. (F. Swietek)