Eyal Sivan
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Documentary

Common State, Potential Conversation [1]

2012 — 124 min — HD — Eyal Sivan
Poster Common State, Potential Conversation [1]

As the vision, or so-called "solution," of two peoples for two states in Palestine-Israel slowly dies, facing apocalyptic visions, an escalation of racism and continued colonisation accompanied by permanent repression by Israel, Common State, Potential Conversation, Eyal Sivan's documentary film, proposes a cinematic encounter between Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews.

Twenty interviews were conducted on the theme of the common state, with political figures and settlers, jurists and artists, elderly and younger people, Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews, Palestinian Arabs from Israel and the occupied territories. Each interviewee answers the same questions in their mother tongue, in dialogue with the director; the screen then splits in two, showing an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian side by side, one listening and the other speaking, then the reverse — staging a meeting point between two realities that everyday life fragments and separates.

Photo gallery

Photo Common State, Potential Conversation [1] 1 Photo Common State, Potential Conversation [1] 2 Photo Common State, Potential Conversation [1] 3 Photo Common State, Potential Conversation [1] 4 Photo Common State, Potential Conversation [1] 5
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Featuring

Ariella Azoulay, Omar Barghouti, Meron Benvenisti, Rozeen Bisharat, Eliaz Cohen, Leila Fersakh, Haim Hanegbi, Sandi Hilal, Ala Hlehel, Hassan Jabareen, Yael Lerer, Gideon Levy, Roucham Marton, Hisham Naffa'a, Salman Natour, Ilan Pappe, Nurit Peled-Elhanan, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, Nadim Rouhana, Yehuda Shenhav, Ayelet Tzviel Haddad, Michel Warschawski, Khaled Ziadeh, Haneen Zoabi.

Awards

• Juliano Mer-Khamis Documentary Award, Cinema South Film Festival, Sderot, Israel, 2012

Press (excerpts)

“An enlightened, lucid and instructive documentary.” Studio Ciné Live *** — “A film invents a country, Israel-Palestine, Palsraelistine. An anagram-territory (…) If it is fictional, it is in the documentary becoming of fiction, in the just becoming of injustice, in the real becoming of utopia.” Les Inrocks
“A utopian dialogue at the Israeli-Palestinian border. Documentarian Eyal Sivan imposes a duty to listen on the protagonists of the conflict. Compelling, nuanced, precise.” Le Monde — “The film frames the problems differently and treats as a problem what some see as a solution: the very idea of partition.” Rue89
“Cinema as the staging of an impossible dialogue? That's the fairly successful gamble of this documentary, which brings Jewish and Arab Israelis together on screen.” Première *** — “the film takes the documentary genre against the grain: instead of sticking to reality — the limit to which it is lazily confined — it tries to create and share a collective vision, that is, an image, in order to make possible, and therefore first thinkable by all, another way of living together.” Débordements
“Common State, Potential Conversation [1] sets out precisely to forge, through the concreteness of spoken words, new and minority representations, to make them possible in the imagination so that, in the (long) term, they might influence reality. Isn't that exactly what we expect from filmmakers?” Politis — “Sivan creates the space of a possibility: of a conversation, and therefore of a politics. Into the line that still separates the figures on screen, he slips the promise of another future. What one might call a 'splice of peace.'” ETVDES
“This device becomes the metaphor for a convulsive history. Austere, but compelling.” Télérama