The Law In These Parts (originally titled Shilton Ha Chok) is an Israeli documentary done by Ra’anan Alexandrowicz. The movie chronicles Israel’s legal system in the Occupied Palestinian Territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip through the past 50 or so years.
I am someone who likes politics but I admittedly don’t know too much about certain topics, Israel being one of those topics so I went in knowing very little. The other thing is I for the most part don’t like the documentary format. I like documentary programs on the history channel or discovery channel but usually when it comes to documentaries they are so heavy handed and so biased that it’s hard for me to figure out if that’s really going on or not. But this documentary does something of which I have never encountered before. The entire film is done on a sound stage where a desk and chair have been set up with a green screen behind it. The documentarian is also the narrator and questioner and he asks a series of Israel Supreme Court Judges their takes on all of the legal issues that presented themselves in occupying a territory. He doesn’t pull any punches and he really digs deep into the legality of overtaking this group of people. While they are talking, old film reels and documentaries of the history of this area is shown on the green screen behind the judges.
But what really gets to me and made me love this film where in most documentaries I don’t, the filmmaker many times throughout the film stated and wanted to make it very clear that the information he was presenting was his own reality, done through the lens of how he understood it, that he was clearly biased towards one way or another and that he was clearly editing the interviews to best serve his own purposes. Having him be clear about that really put me at ease because I could take the information he was presenting and get enough of a basis to go out and study all of this stuff for myself afterwards as well. There was one particular part and this is a bit of a spoiler, where he was talking to one of the judges about a case where most of the actions in the case were kept private, those reasons were said to have been because the documents needed to be private for the protection and safety of the people. It was quite fishy, but then the film maker jumped in saying this interview he was having with this man was 3 hours long, and he himself is editing it down so that only the choices he chooses to show are being shown and the footage of the rest of the interview is not available to us as an audience.
The footage shown and the interviews held were very powerful and at the end it was hard to implicitly state which side is right and which is wrong in the entire argument. This movie is largely political but even so it is incredibly interesting and it never feels slow. The explanations he gives to not only the incidents but also to film making at the same time hold some interesting parallels and this movie is one I highly recommend if you can get out and see it. The movie is in Hebrew with English subtitles.
Upcoming times include Saturday afternoon at the Broadway at 3:45, as well as four more screenings throughout the rest of the week in Park City. For more information check out the Sundance page located here.
http://filmguide.sundance.org/film/120047/the_law_in_these_parts