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Private
Saverio Costanzo
Inspired
by real events, documentary filmmaker Saverio
Costanzo's feature debut is a minimalist
psychological drama about a Palestinian
family of seven suddenly confronted with
a volatile situation in their home that
in many ways reflects the larger ongoing
conflict between Israel and the Palestinian
people.
Mohammad,
his wife and their five children live in
a large, isolated house located halfway
between a Palestinian village and an Israeli
settlement. The house, in the crossfire
of the two sides, is a strategic lookout
point that the Israeli army decides to seize,
confining the family to a few downstairs
rooms in daytime and a single room at night.
Mohammad refuses to leave this home and,
reinforced by his principles against violence,
decides to find a way to keep his family
together in the house until the Israeli
soldiers move on.
Private
is convincingly shot in a documentary style
with a hand-held camera and a quick pace.
Director Costanzo has created a unique occasion
for both Israeli and Palestinian actors
to work together, and being an outsider
himself, he has worked to maintain a neutral
standpoint while dramatizing the conflict.
The
film was Italy's 2005 nominee for the Foreign
Film Oscar.
Reviews
"'Private'
is tense and immediate, rooted in the ongoing
conflict over who owns what in the Middle
East, but it's just as concerned with more
universal questions about how a man should
protect what's his."
-Noel Murray, The Onion
"Edgy...involving
and provocative!"
-Kevin Thomas, LA Times
"[Offers]
a scorching vision of colliding wills and
human error in a Kafka-esque world of rights
arbitrarily and capriciously denied... Costanzo
makes all of this potentially schematic
and didactic material work brilliantly..."
-George Robinson, Jewish Week
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