This Could Be Our Skyline, In a Couple of Decades
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Cops Get Tough With UC Berkeley Protesters
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Truffle Season, It Is Here
SFist Tonight
Someone from the same security company outside the Hitler satire movie we saw the day before was outside the Castro for last night's SF Jewish Film Fest movie too, which was Hothouse, a Sundance award-winning documentary about Palestinians incarcerated in Israel for terrorist crimes. It was a stark reminder of the human cost of the subject of the movie (and we are extremely grateful that we live in a place where one security guard is still enough to put people's minds at ease.)
Filmmaker Shimon Dotan spent about a year interviewing various imprisoned Palestinian political terrorists about their lives and their crimes. We were a little startled that even people serving multiple life sentences in a maximum-security Israeli jail wear street clothes, live together in what look like big dorm rooms, attend graduate programs in universities, and even run for political office. The Israeli prison guards reluctantly admit that prisoners are able to communicate freely amongst themselves and with prisoners in other prisons, and that several terrorist attacks have been planned and executed from within the prison walls.
The interviews were fascinating and extremely disturbing -- intelligent and reasonable-seeming prisoners in high-minded policy debates while the more sullen younger ones sit back, muttering about their plans to commit a suicide bombing when they get out and how they hope to have kids they can strap bombs to. One completely terrifying sociopathic woman, in for planning the high-profile bombing of a Sbarros in Jerusalem, burbles cheerfully on and on about how great it was to drop someone off to kill himself and 15 other people (8 of whom were children. "Eight children? Eight." she says, with a big smile.)
The movie's studiously nonjudgmental (except with the frightening Sbarros woman, who, honestly, we wouldn't want to have to spend any time with ourselves), and beautifully shot and edited. We left the screening pretty frustrated with the intractibility of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, which was probably the point of the movie.
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