Review: Rachel (dir. Simone Bitton, 2009)

Reviewer rating: 3.5/5

On March 16, 2003, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed American girl was run over by an Israeli bulldozer in the Gaza strip. A member of the International Solidarity Movement, Rachel Corrie had put her life on the line in order to stick up for what she believed in - that Israel should stick to its borders and show some humanity for the ordinary civilians who live alongside the wall. Standing outside a Palestinian friend's house with a megaphone instructing the bulldozers to halt their demolition, Corrie was run over and crushed by Israeli soldiers who claimed they never noticed her presence.

Rachel is a documentary by director Simone Bitton that examines the woman behind the headlines. The film opens with the official Israeli line behind her death: that she was hidden behind a mound of dirt and it was the weight of the dirt being pushed on her rather than the bulldozer itself that contributed to her demise. Complete with diagrams, this supports the Israeli autopsy shown later in the film that positions her death as the result of suffocation. Bitton subtley conveys the flimsy argument behind such conclusions through the juxtaposition of Israel's media spin against video footage taken on the ground of soldiers clashing with the activists and the Israeli military spokeswoman's claim that the activists were so disruptive their soldiers had to break for a number of hours.

This indirect interrogation of the Israeli/Palestine conflict through editing characterises Rachel, which avoids any statements of direct blame for the events that transpire. This is one of film's inherent limitations: it never delves into historicisation of the conflict and it avoids taking sides. It also steers clear of an examination of the media maelstrom that followed Corrie's death, where Arafat in an unusual move declared her an Arab matyr. This leads Andrew O'Hehir of Salon.com to declare that the film is an episode of CSI: Gaza without clear political resolution. Rather, we the audience are left to decide between the disjointed recounting of what the Israelis refer to as 'The Incident' and the personal accounts of Corrie as a person as told by the activists. This Orwellian doublespeak underscores the difference in Israeli and Palestinian accounts throughout the film, where bulldozing poor people's houses is rewritten as a 'routine levelling operation' designed to counter terrorism. This inability to take sides in the film is no doubt borne out of the precarious balance that Bitton attempts to hold in terms of Rachel's future audience: as an Israeli she hopes for the film to be shown in Israel, an aim that necessitates a delicate hand (one that would also help with drawing in American audiences who have been swayed by propaganda that positions Hamas as a much more powerful force than it is in reality).

Rachel constantly tugs at this broader political picture through the inclusion of Palestinian graffiti highlighting her contribution to the cause of innocent civilians, the letters Corrie sent to her parents detailing her feelings towards the conflict, the juxtaposition of her highly publicised death with the continuous and unknown deaths of Palestinians, and an examination of the destruction of evidence that inhibited a proper inquiry into the events that transpired. Britton manages to get soldiers on camera confessing that they were instructed to fire on civilians living on the Gaza strip on the hour, every hour throughout the night and that one of their favourite games was shooting out the water tanks of people living in immense poverty and caught in the middle of unrelenting conflict. We visit the 'safe-houses' in Israel where Corrie trained with other members of the International Solidarity Movement in Ghandian techniques of non-violent resistance, her hometown in Washington and the morgue where she was processed.

The occlusion of broader debates on geopolitical sovereignty leaves the viewer with an intensely personal account of the conflict, one that highlights the unequal value of western lives versus those of the Third World. It demonstrates both despair and hope that the fates of countless unknown, innocent civilians could be saved through the intervention of those who by virtue of being westerners are politically difficult to kill. Ending on a wacky rap about Corrie by one of her former colleagues, one can't help feel that the vestiges of humanity are esconced in the hands of idealistic hippies rather than the legislative power of international bodies such as the United Nations. In a world where the level of media attention events get in the West is determined by how many westerners are killed, perhaps it is.

Rachel is currently screening as part of the International Film Festival, see www.nzff.co.nz for screening times.