An excellent Alternate Focus documentary by US communications-academic Gary Fields which examines Palestine through the lens of landscape. Fields does a great job with photographs and with the narration, highlighting the peaceful civil resistance campaigns at Bil’in and Budros. Thanks to Sonja Karkar for passing it on. R/t 28 mins
Ex-Communicated tells the story of Israeli occupation in Palestine through the genre of landscape and the perspective of a camera lens. In his series of remarkable photographs, Gary Fields, a professor of communication at the University of California, San Diego takes us behind the walls, gates, and fences of this deliberately fragmented geography in revealing Palestinian life under Israeli military rule. What he shows in these images is how the forces of occupation use the landscape as an instrument of control over Palestinians and a mechanism for dispossessing them of land and property. Much of this story is untold and largely unseen. These photos convey forcefully how the process of enclosure on the landscape has “ex-communicated” Palestinians, immobilizing them into ever-diminishing spaces, while at the same time inspiring them into heroic acts of peaceful resistance.
