By Sharon Stentiford

Many people associate movie night with lighthearted laughter, buttery popcorn, and a cool stroll out on a starry night with friends -- headed for adventure on the big screen. On my recent night out, my solo venture into one Area 4 movie venue proved to be a night on the town that lingered and stirred on the back burner of my thoughts and emotions days and days after.

Waking in the damp, cold April air – I was vaguely reminded of the springtime promise of emerging new life, of anticipated blossoms and birds and warmth to come. I arrived at 243 Broadway Street, across the street from the Fletcher-Maynard Academy. Following a trail of carefully placed signs leading me onward from the entrance, I rode down an elevator and stepped into a community room where about a dozen neighbors had gathered. I was greeted by one of the film screening’s organizers who handed me a packet of reading materials, told me to help myself to some food, and introduced me to a strikingly colorful parrot on a perch named Sydney. (I at first mistook Sydney for a pretty table centerpiece -- but to my surprise, he started moving!) I grabbed an already-prepared, free plate of tasty Middle Eastern food, and I settled in with the others in front of the screen as the room darkened.

From the onset, this movie does not spare you. The lined and saddened faces of Middle Eastern women who looked older than their years, populated various dialogs in this documentary. I listened with others in the hushed room, to the stories of what happened to these refugee camp inhabitants and their families in 1982 -- within a time span of only 40 hours in Lebanon -- events that changed their lives, profoundly and forever. Women with names like Umm Ali and Sana lost husbands, and some lost children. One young man, Mahmoud, lost his father, three brothers, and several cousins, uncles and aunts. A sense of shock and unreality still permeated their beings as they recalled what happened, and as one cried and kissed a picture of her lost loved one, she said in the Arabic language that was translated throughout the film, “How is it that a picture can be better (more real) than real life?”

After Israel invaded Lebanon and the PLO were evacuated, Israeli defense minister Ariel Sharon announced that “2000 terrorists” remained in the Sabre and Shatila refugee camps. Two days later, the occupying Israeli Army used Lebanese Christian military soldiers called Phalangists to attack these camps. The Israeli soldiers surrounded and sealed off the area and an estimated 2,000 (two thousand) people were slaughtered by the Phalangists in less than two days. The United Nations later called this massacre a genocide.

Many of the victims were not simply killed, but their bodies were desecrated and mutilated as well. A young man talked about a male relative’s head being cut open after he was murdered. One mother talked about pleading with a crane operators not to mangle her daughter’s body after the killing, but to let the young girl’s body be retrieved by digging the earth by hand – but her pleas were in vain.

Walking wearily through the livingroom of her house, an old women showed the filmmaker the multiple leaks raining in upon her home; she lamented that if the men in her family had not been killed, that they would have fixed the leaks. As two old woman talked, one scolded the other, “Do not make me cry, my eyes are all cried out, they hurt.” Horribly but understandably, the other Arab woman – who had lost both her son and her husband -- said of Ariel Sharon, “I want him to die. I want to drink his blood.”

The documentary discusses the efforts of 23 victims to bring their suffering into the world court via the Belgian legal system, to stand as plaintiffs against Sharon and others responsible for the killings, and charge them with genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

I wondered to myself during the discussion that followed the film, how the viewers felt about the Jewish community after viewing this film. To my surprise, when the lady in front of me turned around, I saw she was someone I already knew: an ex-college professor who happened to be Jewish, using some of her newly-found retirement time to work on peace and justice issues. Some of the viewers discussed the way in which information regarding the Palestinian point of view is suppressed by some organizations. One viewer made the distinction of saying that disliking what a government is doing is not the same as disliking the people living under that government.

Raffle tickets were passed around after the discussion and when the numbers were called, I discovered that I won. One of the choices on the prize table was a book called "Galilee Flowers: The Case for Palestine and Israel United in Love to the Holy Land" by Israel Shamir. I picked that one.

Future guests of the series will include the parents of Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old American human rights worker who was crushed to death by an Israeli military bulldozer during a protest in the Gaza Strip in 2003. Her letters home bear powerful testimony to her experiences in the Middle East and her observations of life there.

For more information on the “Unveiling Palestine” film series, now in its third year, please send e-mail to:

pfsoto@mynas.com

Caution: This series is not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach.