A village elder faces the camera and tells the people behind it about his village of Yatta, Palestine. It used to be place with a sizeable community but even decades after the Six Day War with Israel, only half of the population remains. This is the second film I’m seeing at the festival about Palestine and thus, it’s a documentary about genocide.
That genocide also has an economic front, where people only have access to bad healthcare and low paying jobs. They can find better healthcare are jobs behind the wall, but that’s only if they smuggle themselves in. Which brings me to the documentary’s main subjects – two cousins smuggling people in the part of the wall that the Israel Army has yet to build.
The Devil’s Drivers spends six years’ worth of those trips, chronicling the increasing amount of complications that the drivers and the workers face in crossing the wall. I’m still not one hundred percent on whether or not it’s the documentary’s job to show both sides of the conflict. The only representation they get is through IDF members yelling at the Palestinians.
But for the most part, its small scope covers more than enough information. There’s an assumption there that it will only cover a certain gender and generation. But it takes time to listen and return to the elder whom I mentioned earlier in this review. The changes he sees in less than a decade is staggering and the documentary 12makes us feel it.
- Release Date: 9/12/2021
