Letter From Palestine
“…a powerful portrait of the Palestinians … a very important film.”
A half-hour first-person account of Steve York’s visit to Jerusalem and the Israeli-occupied territories in May, 1988.
Filmmaker York worked alone, using a small, inexpensive home video camera to keep a journal as he accompanied a group of Palestinian doctors & medical volunteers traveling through the West Bank to treat villagers whose access to medical care had been interrupted during the first Palestinian Intifada.
There are no scenes of violence but the effects of the uprising are visible: a boy who lost an eye to a rubber bullet, young men with serious gunshot injuries, women with stress-induced complications in pregnancy. In one scene, the medical team is blocked by an Army patrol in a remote village where no one has seen a doctor for 43 days. After negotiations, the Army agrees to let the doctors treat the villagers in an empty house; in five hours they examine and treat 189 patients.