Venice Film Festival

I've been away from the blog for a week or so. This is my yearly visit to Venice for the summer school on cinema and human rights of the European Inter-University Centre. I saw a terrific film on Saturday, Z32 by Avi Mograbi. It is a film about an elite Israeli soldier who describes the murder of several Palestinians in what he called a 'revenge attack'. This was clearly a violation of international law (and, no doubt, a murder under Israeli law as well). The film has wonderful music, with an eclectic chamber orchestra that behaves a bit like a Greek chorus. It seemed to straddle the line between fiction and documentary, but at the end of the screening I went to congratulate Mograbi and ask how much of it was true. He answered: 'It's a documentary.' Try to see this one if you get the chance.