Published: 1 March 2022
Last updated: 4 March 2024
Australian-made doco The Narrow Bridge follows two Palestinians and two Israelis, who lost a loved one in the conflict, and have channelled grief into a bridge for reconciliation
THE NARROW BRIDGE follows the paths of four people, two Palestinian and two Israeli, who lost a child or parent in the conflict and have transformed their grief into a bridge for reconciliation.
Bushra, Rami, Meytal and Bassam, belong to a controversial grassroots movement of broken-hearted people ‘Israeli Palestinian Bereaved Families,’ who have turned personal trauma into public activism.
This Australian-made documentary, by Melbourne filmmaker Esther Takac, which screens in this year’s Jewish International Film Festival, chronicles their campaign to build a just future together in the face of fierce political and family opposition.
The story of the friendship between Rami Elhanan, an Israeli graphic designer, and Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian academic, is by now well known. They met in 2005 at the birth of Combatants for Peace, the organisation Bassam co-founded with Rami’s son Elik.
Bassam was a Palestinian freedom fighter who spent seven years in an Israeli jail, from the age of 17, and became a prisoners’ leader. After watching the movie Schindler’s List in prison, he embraced non-violent resistance.
In 2007, Bassam’s daughter Abir was shot in the back of her head outside her school in a town in the West Bank. Rami went straight to the hospital, and spent two days by her bed.
Abir, the third of Bassam’s six children, was born in 1997, the same year Rami’s daughter Smadar was killed in a suicide bombing by Palestinian terrorists in Jerusalem. Smadar was the third of his four children. “What happened to Abir, for me, was like losing my daughter a second time,” he told Good Weekend magazine in an interview in 2020.
“From the beginning I knew he was very special. I can say I fell in love with this man, very human, very noble,” Bassam said in the interview. “I knew I could work with him: he supports the Palestinian cause, he could represent my case, my people.
“I will never represent his side as someone who belongs to the oppressors but I can represent him as a human being: he wants to live in a moral place, not occupying anyone. This is the importance of a personal relationship: if I know an Israeli, then I know that they are not all the same.”
Q&A WITH RAMI and BASSAM
The Narrow Bridge screens at 4pm, March 6 in the Classic Cinema in Elsternwick, Melbourne, and then on multiple days in JIFF. Following the screening, Rami and Bassam will feature in a Q&A session, via Zoom, with The Jewish Independent journalist Deborah Stone.
In Sydney, the Narrow Bridge screens at 6:40pm, March 9 in the Ritz Cinema in Randwick. Rami, Bassam and director Esther Takac will also feature in a post-screening Q&A. Michaela Kalowski will host the event.
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Photo: Rami Elhanan (left) and Bassam Aramin
