The OWR17 Film ScheduleThe closing film “No Other Land” follows the efforts of Basel Adra, a resident of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, to prevent the total removal of the Palestinian presence from the region. Evictions of villagers take place regularly, and even when they’re paused, physical and psychological harassment and constant tension vitiate any attempt by the people to lead normal lives. In this context, Basel meets Yuval, an Israeli journalist sensitive to the Palestinian cause. A friendship blossoms between them, but it’s complicated by this mixture of a common reason and the profoundly different level when it comes to its understanding: Basel sees his struggle as a legacy but also an implacable destiny; Yuval knows that for him it is a choice he can always give up. The opening film “Zagor’s Death” tells the story of former photographer and videographer Joseph Zagor (75), who was evicted several times and left homeless in Cluj-Napoca. With his old camera, he documents the last four years of his life, marked by loneliness and illness. The feature directed by Adrian Dohotaru, president of the Sustainable Organised Society Association SOS who has been by Zagor’s side during all this time, offers both poetic justice and empowerment through cinematic documentation to those invisible people who do not fit into the new dynamic image of inaccessibly expensive cities like Cluj-Napoca. The four OWR17 sections are complementary to the festival theme “Choose!”, observed from several perspectives: Choices, A Safe Place, Beyond Constraints and Echoes from the Past. Added to these are retrospectives dedicated to filmmakers Maryam Tafakory and Eyal Sivan, who will attend the festival in Bucharest, the Sahia Vintage project, which makes a comeback with a new selection of newsreels dedicated to current affairs from the communist era, and Youth Days, a programme dedicated to teenagers that takes OWR’s interest in making documentary film accessible and appealing to young audiences even further.
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