Wall

As if she could make the hated thing dissolve by gazing at it with enough intensity, TV documentarian Simone Bitton stared with her camera eye as a ”security fence” hundreds of miles long was erected in 2002 to separate Israelis from Palestinians in the West Bank. In Wall, her stately, outraged partisan nonfiction film, Bitton — a self-described ”Arab Jew” based in Paris and Jerusalem — makes clear that she finds both the concept and the concrete absurd at best, and a tragedy at worst. The interviews she conducts, almost all with Arabs and Jews who share her despair, are less meaningful than what she captures in silence: the sight of farmers separated from their farmland, everyday people thwarted in their dailiness, and children playing next to what looks like prison walls.