[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, January 20, 3:00 pm –Screening Room, Sundance Resort]

My new film, The Law in These Parts chronicles the legal mechanism created around Israel’s 44-year military occupation of the Palestinian people. It is a film which explores something theoretically there for people to see, but that is completely hidden from society’s eye.

The film’s raw materials are laws, verdicts, appeals – some of the driest and least appealing materials that exist. The effort to bring this material to life and create cinema around it was the most complicated task I have ever taken upon myself.

When I discussed the film with people or shared my writing about the project with them, they usually responded: “That’s really interesting, you should write a book,” or “And how are you going to make a film out of it?” The most common response was: “Important subject – isn’t it better nowadays to create a website?”

So why film?

The answer is something I have felt very strongly during the film’s recent screenings. It’s about eyes. It’s about some of the eyes that I see looking at me in Q&A sessions after the film ends. Certain people, who usually don’t ask any questions but have a certain and very specific look in their eyes – a look that seems to say to me, “I wish I hadn’t seen your film. I wish I never came.”

These eyes are the answer to the question “why film?” Because, as the Indian writer Arundhati Roy said, “once you see it, you can’t unsee it…”