More in ‘documentaries’

“I’m not a self-hating Jew,” the radical lawyer William Kunstler says in William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe, a documentary opening today. “Anyone who knows me knows I love myself.” Kunstler became famous—or infamous, depending on your point of view—for defending the Chicago Seven, the Catonsville 9 (who burned draft files to protest Vietnam), Meir Kahane’s ...

In Israel, understanding the present sometimes requires traveling to the past. And what better guide than Susan Sontag: although she is remembered primarily for her writing, the renowned intellectual dabbled in filmmaking as well, and, in the fall of 1973, traveled to Israel to shoot a documentary,
Promised Lands, which will have a rare screening in Brooklyn on Tuesday. She couldn’t have picked a more dramatic moment: the Yom Kippur War was raging, and everywhere Sontag trained her camera she found a country newly despairing over the future prospect of living in peace with its Arab neighbors. The Israel of 1973, it turns out, is depressingly, and clarifyingly, familiar.

Last month, as the White House was engaged in orchestrating a carefully choreographed diplomatic dance on the subject of Israeli settlements, rumors surfaced on the Washington blogs that Hillary Clinton was thinking of bringing Sidney Blumenthal, a steadfast Clinton loyalist, to the State Department as a speechwriting consultant. But this week, as Clinton delivered her first major policy address at the Council on Foreign Relations, The New York Times reported that Blumenthal was among several Clinton friends whose appointments had been scuttled by the Obama administration.

Ari Folman at the airport in Beirut in 1982
In September 1982, Christian supporters of President Bashir Gemayel, enraged by his assassination, massacred hundreds of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in West Beirut while Israeli soldiers surrounding the camps did nothing to stop the brutality. Director Ari Folman was among them, but found, ...

In Mother Economy, a nineteen-minute video by Israeli artist Maya Zack, an unnamed woman walks around a World War II–era German apartment meticulously taking notes and measurements that seem to make sense only to her. She traces household objects on the floor—cigarette ash, pocket change—or finds them—a ring, torn stockings—scattered about, and what seem like ...

Vanessa Engle is nothing if not persistent in pursuit of a subject. For a 2004 BBC documentary on art in the 1960s, she phoned Marianne Faithfull’s manager every working day for a year until she was finally granted an interview. In Jews, which recently aired on BBC Four, Engle’s doggedness pays off again. The first ...

The pioneers of the kibbutz movement in the 1920s and ’30s were passionate adherents of prevailing socialist ideals and applied them as faithfully as possible. In practice, that meant privileging physical labor over intellectual activity, and the group over the individual. Perhaps most radically, it meant all but eradicating the family unit as we know ...