Three recent documentaries, one dealing with the Palestinians and two with the War in Lebanon, were among the film screened at the Cinema du Reel, an international festival of ethnographic and sociological films, help in Paris this March. Eyal Sivan's Aqabat Jaber: Passing Through provides a bleak glimpse of life in the West Bank refugee camp of Aqabat Jaber. Once the largest camp in the Middle East, with a population of 65.000 people from 116 villages, it was half destroyed in the 1967 war and has been abandoned by all but some 3,000 inhabitants, including a group of Negev Bedouin who have been settled there. The film came about alter the director, a 23-year-old lsraeIi photographer now living in Paris, Was sent to the camp on a fashio..
Source : Miriam Rosen — Middle East Report, 01.11.1987