Bearing Witness

A new film, “Five Broken Cameras,” has won praise for doing something as difficult as it is simple: bearing witness. Here is how The New York Times describes the film made by Emad Burnat, a Palestinian Villager who started making his film when he was given a video camera at the birth of his son:

The new documentary intersperses scenes of villagers fighting the barrier with Mr. Burnat’s son Gibreel’s first words (“cartridge,” “army”), undercover Israeli agents taking away friends and relatives, and Mr. Burnat’s wife, Soraya, begging him to turn his attention away from politics and be with his family. Over six years, Mr. Burnat went through five cameras, each broken in the course of filming — among other things, by soldiers’ bullets and an angry settler. At the start of the film, Mr. Burnat lines up the cameras on a table. They form the movie’s chapters and create a motif for the unfolding drama — the power of bearing witness. Mr. Burnat never puts his camera down and it drives his opponents mad.

It takes incredible courage and resolve to do something as simple as tell the truth. And yet, the truth is absolutely essential in our world. To do so is both selfish (in regard to one's family) and selfless (insofar as one sacrifices oneself to the public need for truth).  As Jaqueline Bao wrote on this blog in September, "In bearing witness, we carry the burden of the unpleasantry of truths just as we give life to the permanence of the world by establishing a common reality."

For Hannah Arendt, the world can survive without justice. But it cannot survive without truth. As she writes:

“What is at stake is survival, the perseverance of existence, and no human world destined to outlast the short life span of mortals within it will ever be able to survive without men willing to do what Herodotus was the first to undertake consciously—namely, to say what is.” (Truth and Politics, 229).

I have not seen Five Broken Cameras. But I hope to. I am sure it tells one side of the complicated story that is euphemistically referred to as the Middle East Crisis. And yet, in Mr. Burnat's resolve to bear witness, we encounter one way that the truth must be told.

Five Broken Cameras won the Audience Award at the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam, and is one of about a dozen films competing at Sundance this week in the World Documentary category. You can watch the trailer for Five Broken Cameras Here.

-RB