Moments of magic from a land torn by strife

An hour into the documentary film “Promises,” a startling exchange occurs. It’s not an exchange of glances or words, but a playful banter in burps. The conversationalists are two boys in their early teens: an Orthodox Jew living in the Old City of Jerusalem and a Palestinian, probably from the area’s Muslim quarter. The Jewish boy is being interviewed for the film about his perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Just as he states, matter-of-factly, that he has no Palestinian friends and doesn’t know any Jewish kids who do, the other boy enters the frame, looks quizzically, mischievously, at him and coyly sends a belch in his direction.

The Jewish boy doesn’t miss a beat. He burps right back. The Palestinian boy responds in kind, and back and forth croak the burps, punctuating the testimony with what sounds like a chorus of frogs.

Both boys smile broadly, and viewers of this brilliant film about children on both sides of the political, cultural and religious divide between Israelis and Palestinians won’t be able to hold back their grins either. While this glottal duet is not exactly a road map to peace, it does reveal how fundamental and irrepressible is the human desire to connect. Boys will be boys. People will be people. Numerous shining moments of connection play themselves out in the film but, people being people, that other human instinct -- to tear asunder -- gets its due as well. The violence and separatism voiced by the children are as chilling as their interest in one another is heartwarming.

“Promises” -- which was written and directed by B.Z. Goldberg and Justine Shapiro and nominated for a 2001 Academy Award as best feature documentary -- takes viewers on a stirring journey of revelation. It’s one of the highlights of the exhibition “One Ground: 4 Palestinian & 4 Israeli Filmmakers” at UC Riverside’s California Museum of Photography.

Because of the charged nature of the exhibition’s subject, bringing these films together required far more in the way of collaboration and diplomacy than the average group show. Copies of e-mail correspondence between the artists and the show’s organizers -- museum director Jonathan Green and assistant curator Mitra Abbaspour -- line an entry wall, giving visitors some sense of the process involved. Concerned about the context inflecting the reception of their work, several artists withheld their participation until they determined who else would be included. None could abide by the original title of the show, “Shared Histories.” In one missive, an artist proposed “Unshared Histories” as an alternative. Eventually, the title was massaged into the more neutral “One Ground.”

A 10-foot-high satellite photograph shows the region of Israel and the Palestinian territories as a whole, defined by topographical features like coastlines, hills and deserts. More influential to the sensibilities of the filmmakers represented here are the markers not visible from this perspective -- the borders, fences and checkpoints that divide the area and its inhabitants. The films run from just 10 minutes to an hour and a half, and their common focus is the psychological landscape shaped by this splintered and fenced terrain.

Some of the films have made the rounds of festivals internationally. A few are making their U.S. premieres in the show. “Promises” is both the most accessible of the lot and, in its documentary-style mosaic of voices, the most conventional in form. The rest tend to be more diaristic, idiosyncratic. Their narratives, if they exist at all, are fragmented and incomplete. Abstraction and humor soften the overall tone, but friction prevails, particularly the friction between harsh concrete realities of the here and now and uncertainty about the future. Although the lack of resolution in the films can be wearying, even frustrating, for the viewer, it’s intentional and, ultimately, effective as a mirror of the vulnerability of daily life under the threat of terrorism and the constrictions of occupation.

In the short film “Waiting” (2002), Rashid Masharawi stages a meditation on the condition of irresolution. The film consists of a sequence of screen tests for another film (whose subject is the act of waiting) that presumably exists outside this one.

The filmmaker, born in the Gaza Strip and living in Paris and the Palestinian territories, tells each of the actors who’ve come to audition simply to wait. How they do that is what he’s interested in. They smoke, pace, rise to their feet and sit back down, tap fingers, sigh, take glasses off, put them back on. Their restlessness and coping mechanisms read as an amusing commentary on the demands of living in political limbo.

“Border” (2000) explores the guarded boundary between Lebanon and Israel from the perspective of its inquisitive filmmaker, Michal Rovner, an Israeli who lives in New York. Rovner tags along with the military commander in charge of the border and films her observations in a sober, nonlinear fashion. We see snippets of the land, the military outposts and the free, calligraphic flight of birds above, and we hear her conversations, death being close to the surface of them all. The most intriguing are her exchanges with the military commander, who advises her to stay in her own, art-driven reality, because his reality is one that she could not possibly comprehend. In the course of the 49-minute film, Rovner asks several people she meets how her work should end, fishing for their sense of what the conclusion of the conflict will be. One suggests a shot of a military helicopter flying overhead, another simply something happy. The end comes, of course, without any resolution. Sequence follows sequence at a slow, impressionistic pace. At one point, there’s an explosion of some sort, birds flutter overhead, and the film is over.

Avi Mograbi’s highly engaging “Happy Birthday Mr. Mograbi” (1999) also finishes with a pile of loose ends. In this parable of political and personal conflict, the Israeli filmmaker plays a fictionalized version of himself, caught in a bind between competing commitments. His Israeli producer has commissioned him to make a film about Israel’s 50th anniversary jubilee. At the same time, a Palestinian producer has hired him to shoot Palestinian villages turned to ruins in the aftermath of Israel’s statehood in 1948, which Palestinians call the Catastrophe.

Mograbi the filmmaker deftly interweaves these narratives with a third that pertains metaphorically to the larger political picture, while Mograbi the character struggles to reconcile mutually exclusive interpretations of simultaneous events. The absurdity of the character’s dilemma is rooted in the real, and the film prompts viewers to wonder if the real is not equally indebted to the absurd.

“One Ground” covers a lot of ground -- and takes about seven hours to see in its entirety. Films by Mona Hatoum, Emily Jacir, Elia Suleiman and Ori Gersht are inconsistently compelling, but each contributes a distinct voice to this vital dialogue. A selection of 19th century photographs of the Holy Land from the museum’s collection adds depth and texture to the show. Even the installation, which combines large projections on tilted walls with smaller, wall-mounted screens -- and was designed by an Egyptian and an Israeli architect in partnership -- furthers a sense of expanded possibilities through contact and collaboration.

This is a powerful show. The films, grounded in personal, direct experience, nuance and ambiguity, make for honest, necessary counterparts to the crisp polarities of the nightly news. Art’s role in shaping consciousness feels secure here -- and yet limited. How limited is a theme made explicit in some of the films and left implicit in the rest.

A Palestinian boy in “Promises” puts it best when, toward the end of the film, he admits, “I feel torn inside.” He has just spent the day playing, for the first time, with Jewish kids across the divide, and the relationships he never thought he wanted suddenly feel too precious to lose. “Part of me wants to connect with you,” he says. He then dissolves into sobs. The filming will soon be done, he cries, and their friendship will have been in vain.

*

‘One Ground: 4 Israeli & 4 Palestinian Filmmakers’

Where: UCR/California Museum of Photography, 3824 Main St., Riverside

When: Tuesdays-Sundays, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Until 8 p.m. Wednesdays. Closed Mondays.

Ends: Aug. 31

Price: Free

Contact: (909) 784-FOTO or www.cmp.ucr.edu