The Village of Peace (Ben Schuder, Niko Philipides, 2014): Israel, USA

5

Reviewd by Johanna Carlsson at Santa Barbara International Film Festival 2014

The Village of Peace. Sounds pretty good to me! But what is it and where can you find this village? The Village of Peace is a community in Israel where Africans-Americans started to immigrate into in 1967. They are called African-Hebrew and today lives 5000 African-Hebrew in the village. In this documentary, we get to follow the people’s life in the village and we will also get to know things about their history. This is a movie directed by Ben Schuder and Niko Philipides. The idea of making the movie came when one of the crew members, Sam Shuder, visited a friends family in Dimona, Israel. It was here he stared to learn about The Village of Peace and he found it unique and wanted to share it with the rest of the world. A year later Sam and the rest of the crew traveled to Israel to start filming the movie.

The movie shows pictures from people’s everyday life in the village. The movie has a few “main characters” who are being interviewed. You can not here the questions when they are asked but just the answers that are given. They talk about a lot of things, they talk about their history, music, food, exercise, school and marriage. There are images from back in the days and people who have experienced the immigration from America to Israel tells us their stories and shows pictures and video clips.

It is very interesting to hear and see how they live. It is not the typical life I imagined of Israel. This was something the filmmakers wanted with the movie, they wanted to give a different picture of Israel than people normally have. You maybe tend to think that there are a lot of conflicts in Israel and with this movie they wanted to move the focus away from the conflicts. They talk about conflicts but it is not within Israel, the conflicts they talked about were the one in Chicago during the sixties that made the African- Americans move to the village. I think it is good that they wanted to show a different picture of Israel so that people can be more aware of that it is a completely normal life they live there as well.

Some things they talked about in the movie were very different from our culture. For an example, their view of marriage is differently from how we see it. But is it not what makes culture so exciting? That it can be so different from each other. I think it is fun to learn about how other people in other culture live their life. If this was a movie about my everyday life, it would not have been that interesting since I know so much about it.

They used the camera to show us many images from the village. It was shots of landscape, close ups of people and images from the history. This contributed to the movie since you got the see the places they were talking about. You were able to use more senses, through both listening and seeing. They also had music in the movie that were representative and got you in the right mood. I think you should see this movie if you are interested in culture and want to learn more about it!


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