The Atlanta Jewish Film Festival is showing a documentary tonight and tomorrow that may be of special interest to lawyers.

“The Law in These Parts,” a Grand Jury Prize winner at the Sundance Film Festival, “is an unflinching examination of Israel’s contorted legal framework for governing Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, and the complex moral and legal dilemmas therein,” the festival website says. “Since the 1967 War, inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza Strip have been subjected to what was intended as a temporary system of military rather than civilian justice, overseen by the Israeli Defense Forces. Adopting inventive filmmaking and investigative techniques, filmmaker Ra’anan Alexandrowicz (James’ Journey to Jerusalem) places now-retired judges, attorneys and generals on a cinematic witness stand to consider a number of troubling case studies, and the logic and repercussions of the Kafkaesque rule of law they helped to create. With historical footage projected behind them, interviewees submit to hard-hitting and often uncomfortable questions from which a core conundrum emerges: can a country sustain a prolonged military occupation without eroding its democratic values?”

The film plays tonight at Lefont Sandy Springs, starting at 7:40 p.m., and it is followed by a discussion with Laurie R. Blank,  Director,  International Humanitarian Law Clinic at Emory University; Sharon Kabalo, Deputy Consul General
of Israel; David Lewis, a journalist, documentarian and producer.

The film will be shown Wednesday at Lefont Sandy Springs at 2:30 p.m., with panelists Opher Aviran, Consul General of
Israel; Kevin Cieply, B.S., J.D., LL.M., Associate Dean of Academics and Associate Professor, John Marshall Law School; and Itai Tsur Community Advocate.

Contributor: Jonathan Ringel in Legal Community | subscribe to rss |   share