Documentaries About Israel Shut Out at Oscars
Emad Burnat, Palestinian director of the Oscar-nominated documentary ?5 Broken Cameras,? arrives on the red carpet with his family. Image by getty images
The Academy Award for Best Documentary went to “Searching for Sugar Man,” shutting out both “The Gatekeepers” and “5 Broken Cameras,” two films that were extremely critical of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians.
Emad Burnat, Palestinian director of the Oscar-nominated documentary ?5 Broken Cameras,? arrives on the red carpet with his family. Image by getty images
“The Gatekeepers” featured interviews with Israeli security insiders who criticize the country’s leaders for failing to end the conflict with the Palestinians.
“5 Broken Cameras,” on the other hand, examined the conflict through the eyes of a Palestinian village in the occupied West Bank.
Emad Burnat, one of “5 Broken Camera”s directors, was briefly detained by U.S. authorities when he arrived in Los Angeles for the Oscars last week.
His wife, Soraya, turned heads on the red carpet by wearing a traditional Palestinian white-and-red patterned dress.
“Sugar Man,” which is directed by Malik Bendjelloul, film charts the life of Sixto Rodriguez, an obscure ’70s singer. His work improbably provided a soundtrack for the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
