munamuno

"My So-Called Enemy" chronicles the experiences over a period of several years of six remarkable young women from Palestine and Israel, from their participation at a camp in New Jersey (a program called "Building Bridges") to their homes in Israel and the Palestinian territories and beyond. The conflict in that region provides a backdrop for the film, but the primary focus of the film is the transformative and re-humanizing power of compassionate listening and the forging of personal connections between people who are, due to their circumstances, supposed to see each "other" as enemies. The film is not at all a "message" film though, it is remarkably non-ideological and makes no attempt to simplify the complicated or offer easy solutions to the seemingly intractable difficulties faced by the subjects of the film. It is a personal and sometimes painfully intimate portrait of the deep psychological complexities young people encounter when faced with historic social conflict in their personal and public lives. Triumphs of friendship in apparently impossible circumstances, heartbreak and frustration with the terrible costs of conflict, and the gradual coming of age of each of the participants in the film are all addressed beautifully.

The subject matter of this film is, in my estimation, applicable to so many of the conflicts we face in our lives. Whether the issue is immigration, economic class, race, religion, etc, there are numerous touch points in the film that will provide a valuable starting point for important dialogue.