This time it presents the actions of activists, artists and intellectuals who are denouncing the occupation and the abuse that it entails. Breaking the Silence! takes its title from the Israeli Breaking the Silence organization that since 2000 has been recording the testimonies of soldiers in the West Bank and Gaza. It is around their exhibition, these necessary documents, that this programme has been woven, in close collaboration with filmmaker Simone Bitton and the Union of Progressive Jews of Belgium.
Breaking the Silence (exhibition / photos)
Breaking the Silence has collected and compiled over 2,500 hours of interviews about, among other things, daily life in Hebron. How do the soldiers see their mission/duty to protect Jewish settlers in Hebron, the population of which is composed mainly of Palestinians ? How does the Israeli military presence affect the civilian population ? The exhibition aims to discuss the dilemmas and ethical issues that soldiers face. It presents a hundred or so photographs taken by soldiers whilst on duty in the Israeli Defence Forces. Former soldiers, active members of Breaking the Silence accompany the exhibition's visit and talk about their mission in the West Bank and other occupied territories of Palestine.
Un Voyage Halluciné Dans Une Dictature Émotionnelle (performance / documentary)
A young woman from Jerusalem guides the public on a journey of sound, visuals and texts through the Israeli society. The pain, memory and courage are celebrated allover, the codes and symbols are stretched to exhaustion. The songs, speeches, dances and sirens are omnipresent from birth to death of individuals, who, are taken hostage by a ruthless system become actors in a dazzling and macabre collective hallucination and jump into a violent whirlwind, national & sad. Israel accelerates its desperate and futile headlong: the emotional dictatorship.
Z 32 (cinema)
A young Israeli, while serving in the army, participates in a revenge operation in which two innocent Palestinian policemen are murdered. The film works as a confessional for the young man, who faces the camera to speak to his girlfriend about his guilt. The girlfriend, a thoughtful listener, raises the moral issues while assimilating the unbearable thought that her lover is a murderer. Mograbi, by partially concealing their faces with digitized masks, questions his own political and artistic behaviour.
Briseurs de silence (radio essay)
Breakers of silence is a sound essay inspired by the work of Breaking the Silence. Voices of Israeli exiles - mostly themselves ex-Tsahal (IDF) soldiers (like Simone Bitton herself) - speak the words of the current generation of soldiers, men and women. Against a background of sounds brought back from Gaza and the West Bank, the banality and the universality of the evil is heard in French, with the Hebrew accent that you do not lose. Just as one does not lose the memory of the actions one has carried out, the humiliation one has inflicted, the death one has dealt out - because it was like that, you know, there, routine, it was like that ....
Une conversation autour de « Breaking the Silence » (lecture)
Breaking the Silence has broken the wall of silence as well as conventional methods of industrial information. Breaking the Silence's way of collecting information finally verifies what 'respectable' media have consistently denied: Palestinian news. After living in Gaza, author and journalist Amira Hass now lives in the West Bank, where she writes in the daily newspaper Haaretz about life under Israeli occupation. She is the only Jewish Israeli journalist to have lived 17 years in the occupied territories among the Palestinians and who lived there during the second Intifada. Two works have been drawn from her successive experiences: Drinking the Sea at Gaza and Correspondent in Ramallah. For years, she has focused almost exclusively on describing the policy of demographic separation and closure that has developed since 1991 - synonymous with draconian restrictions on freedom of movement.
Briser le silence ! L'armée israélienne en question (round-table conference)
The occupation of Palestine by Israel and its army has not been without an effect on Israeli society, as it affects its heart, the heart of this society: its army; composed of young men and women who can not escape the obligation of military service unless they become "refuseniks". After the pictures, films, sounds, videos, photos, room for words to shed light, in the words of Breaking the Silence, on "a reality in which the deterioration of moral principles finds a means of expression in the form of orders and rules of engagement, and is justified in the name of Israel's security".
