Children (Yeladim)

Director/producer: Ada Ushpiz 
Country: Israel 
Duration: 130 minutes(feature) 
Year: 2020 
Language: Arabic, Hebrew, English  
Category: Around the World in 10 Films  
Category Sponsor: RNZ
Topics: Conflict, Youth, Activism, Civil/Human Rights

Pawns in a life they did not choose. Meet the third generation of the occupation.

Five Palestinian children ages 7-17, open a window into their world trapped within the violence, humiliation, and daily confrontations with soldiers and settlers. While clinging to their childhood, each child finds their own way to cope and to construct emotional and political worlds in an impossible situation.  
 
The film combines the children’s intimate experiences, with the constant soundtrack of their lives on closed circle TV and social media, and their schools' educational programmes. Caught between an impenetrable occupation and Palestinian society, the children are increasingly mobilized to fight against it – they are looking for their voices.  
 
Their helplessness is heartbreaking but it is undeniable they are still just children, naughty, funny and dreaming. 
 
Israeli documentarist Ada Ushpiz (Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt) has made a distressing, intimate study of the ways in which daily experience of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict politicizes children from early on, leading them to acts of sometimes drastic protest. 
 Jonathan Romeny, Screen Daily