THE HILLTOPS (Igal Hecht, Canada). 45 minutes. Some subtitles. Rating: NN
Igal Hecht, producer of last year’s The Story Of Furious Pete, takes his camera to the hilltops of the West Bank and the Golan Heights, where fundamentalist Jews are building illegal settlements in Palestinian territory. The settlers argue that the land was given to them by God, and no peace agreement can negate that compact the Israeli government would really like them to stop, since it’s offensive to Palestinians and generally fucking up the peace process.
It’s a great topic, but Hecht bobbles the execution, spending half an hour letting the settlers state their case over and over again. The doc’s last third picks up with a fascinating conversation between two settlers and a very patient Palestinian gentleman, plus footage of a settlement being torn down by the Israeli military, but that just left me wondering why Hecht didn’t tell those stories from the start.
