By Nadia Kamil / @nadiakamil
I recently saw the Oscar-nominated 5 Broken Cameras and it affected me deeply – though definitely not the first film to make me cry, it was the first film that made me cry audibly. It spurred me into learning more about the history & current situation in Palestine. So I was pleased to see another documentary film coming out of the region.
When The Boys Return is an hour-long portrait of a group of boys in a post-prison rehabilitation group. The Israeli army arrested them all as children, each serving between two months to two years in prison. The most common charge was throwing stones.
The film intimately captures the fragility of these boys caught between adolescence & occupation. The occupation determines their whole lives; it consumes them as they live to fight against it, constantly worrying about being monitored by the Israeli army & getting arrested again. One of the boys nonchalantly admits he sleeps fully clothed in case the army comes to arrest him at night.
When asked about what they hope to do in the future one of the boys responds, “to end the occupation” and when his counselor presses him as to what he will do if that happens, he quietly says he’ll “be free”. He can’t think beyond the occupation. The walls erected by Israel are physical for these boys but also mental. It blocks them from seeing a life beyond living in the shadow of it.
The film is fairly narrow in its scope and provides only the smallest amount of context. There is no explanation of what the occupation is or why the boys feel they have to fight against it. There is very little description of what life in an Israeli prison is actually like for a Palestinian child and only a brief moment where their counsellor explains that their arrests & prison stays were illegal & in breach of international human rights. There is no comment or representation from Israel, only shaky footage of IDF soldiers shooting from tanks, brandishing guns, stalking villages, rounding up child arrestees.
When the Boys Return is a melancholy picture of the seemingly inescapable cycle of anger, resistance, and arrest for many Palestinian boys but watching without a sound knowledge of the illegal occupation of the West Bank; the film might fail to have the emotional impact these stories should provoke.
