TANTURA
In the 1990s, graduate student Teddy Katz compiled nearly 140 hours of recorded interviews with Israeli and Palestinian witnesses to the forced depopulation of the Palestinian village of Tantura in 1948. These interviews — in which some members of the Israeli Alexandroni Brigade asserted that hundreds of Palestinian civilians had been murdered, among other potential war crimes — were effectively buried for decades. Now, filmmaker Alon Schwarz takes another look at the issue, presenting Katz’s research alongside new interviews with surviving members of the brigade, most of whom are now in their nineties. Despite the variety of differing takes — from full-throated denials of wrongdoing to disturbing accounts of cold-blooded killing — a more nuanced account of what really happened at Tantura gradually emerges. Tantura is less interested in relitigating the events of 1948 than in examining how and why a nation might try to obscure its own history.
All sales are final. Admission is not guaranteed after scheduled start time.
CLICK HERE to return to the complete 31st Philadelphia Film Festival schedule.