Abu Bassam

Toshikuni Doi is a 50-ish Japanese journalist now visiting the U.S. after spending years in the Occupied Territories with a camcorder. The other day at Columbia he had his first American audience, for a documentary about a family in a Gaza refugee camp in the '90s.

"I want to give Palestinian people a human face," Doi said by way of introduction. "You see that Palestinians are human beings like you. They have a family. They love each other. Each person has a name. That is my message."

The film is nearly an hour long, and is cinema verite, compressed from hundreds of hours of shooting, and without commentary. It was shot chiefly inside the cinderblock rooms of the family of a man called Abu Bassam, and its focus is on father and sons, with only occasional intrusions of the outside world. Some heavily-armed Israeli soldiers, for instance, swing by on anonymous patrols.

The film is utterly desolating. You see a large family having to live almost its entire life within a few square meters. Many times there are a dozen people in a small room, eating or talking, paying cards, watching television. The family's income is meager, their opportunities almost nil. The oldest son was arrested for his participation in a demonstration and spent two years in an Israeli prison, and now cannot get employment. "I feel like I am slowly wasting away, day by day." The second son has lately lost his job as a butcher in Israel because he cannot renew papers that were arbitrarily seized at a crowded checkpoint, and the process of renewing the papers involves days of waiting outside, and arbitrary refusals. The third son dreamed of being a doctor. "I wanted to make a contribution to society." There was no way for him to become a doctor, he became a teacher, and he is unemployed.  read more »