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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