Where Should the Birds Fly?

Director/narrator Fida Qishta, a Palestinian writer living in Gaza, says she taught herself filmmaking to earn a living, making videos of weddings and other celebrations among Arab neighbors. But she also captured the horrors of Israeli military action against her neighborhood during Israel's December 2008 strikes on Gaza—for being a suspected terrorist hideout. Over the course of several weeks of warfare ("Operation Cast Lead"), says Qishta, 13 Israelis died—and about a hundred times that many were killed on the Palestinian side. In interviews and after-siege footage, Qishta shows the bulldozing of her mother's home, as well as hideous wounds suffered by children hit with incendiaries. Special emphasis is put on the struggles of Gaza's farmers and fishermen, who particularly suffer under bullying Israeli patrols, and the film finds a haunting voice in self-possessed Mona, age 11, who calmly talks about the deaths of both her mother and father, who perished from a strike by three Apache missiles. Later, while watching a pre-attack wedding video, kids make a game of pointing to the dancing family members on the monitor and discuss who is still alive and who did not survive. Any political or terrorist sympathies remain off-camera here as Qishta serves up a troubling portrait of modern civilian "collateral damage." Recommended. Aud: C, P. (C. Cassady)