Robert Greenwald
The documentary is about the Palestinian journalists, over two hundred of whom have been killed by Israel since the war began. The reason I decided to make the film has a couple of layers to it. Number one, as a Jew from New York City, and as someone who has done a lot of films and work around war, I felt morally — it was a moral necessity that I do something. This was against the advice of many people who were of the school that everything Israel does is accurate, defensible, a reaction to being under attack. I disagreed with that.
The more I researched it, the more I saw clips, the more we heard from people in Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel, the stronger my commitment to doing something became.
Then the question becomes: What could or should we do that wasn’t already being done? Because some of it was being covered — tragically not enough, but some of it was being covered. And I decided to tell the story of journalists on the assumption that the killing of so many journalists, an unprecedented number of journalists, would force the traditional media to write about it. And I was wrong. We’ve had almost zero success in getting any of the more traditional media in the United States to cover it.
On the other hand, we are reaching people, I believe — not the haters, not the people who think any Palestinian should be killed — but we are reaching people who don’t care about the issue, people who don’t see it affecting them and have tuned out. From that point of view, I believe the five hundred screenings are a significant beginning of that, and I think we will help move people to take action.
Often, when people ask me what Brave New Films does, I say we put a face on policy.
The other part of it is, there’s a huge racist element in all of this. I felt if we could humanize a few journalists, it would be much stronger than…
Auteur: Robert Greenwald
