Closing your Eyes
Robin Hunzinger
2005 - 83 min - DV Cam - Couleur - France

In the West Bank, the people are not the only daily victims of the occupation, also is the territory. Everywhere, the country is shredded, almost unreadable after the violence exerted on the landscape, voluntarily, systematically. Walls hide the horizon, barbed wire run over the hills, no man’s lands part the fields, checkpoints lock the cities, neighbourhoods and even streets... Behind the Israeli partitioning politics appear the real stakes: settlements expansion, rich soils annexation, water control.
In an "always interrupted" trip, on the roads as well as inside the cities, "Closing your Eyes" leads us through the West Bank to Nablus, Hebron, and Qalqilyah. Three Palestinian cities dying from Israeli occupation, three kinds of partitioning, three steps in the slow process of people suffocating: rebellion in Nablus, surrender in Hebron, resignation in Qalqilyah.
Depicting extremely heavy situations where images speak for themselves, "Closing your Eyes" gives an account of Palestinian lives, where men, women, and children are facing every day that living is impossible.
Through their gravity and their dignity, we discover a very educated people, sharing the same values of ours, and waiting for the world to open their eyes in order to finally being able to live in peace.