Six Floors to Hell

This week is the 10th anniversary of the Tel Aviv International Documentary Film Festival at the Cinematheque. The Docaviv festival has an explicit social agenda of presenting the voices and narratives of underrepresented members of society.

On Friday, I viewed a Korean documentary called 16 Takes on Korean Society, a compilation of social protest narratives by a team of South Korean directors. While the film presented interesting individual stories, it lacked a sense of continuity. Also, while it succeeded in raising awareness about social issues on the periphery of Korean society, it failed to inspire a clear sense of what action could be taken to tangibly combat the problems presented. Given the small size of the audience, Ayalon and I were able to speak with one of the directors after the screening. She was very nice, but it was a very uncomfortable experience for me given my issues with conversing in Korean, and I felt unsatisfied with her explanation of the vision and purpose of the film.

Tonight, I saw an Israeli documentary entitled Six Floors to Hell. This powerful documentary presented the story of Palestinian workers who slip illegally into Israel in search of work. The workers profiled in the film lived during the week in an abandoned underground structure near Geha Junction. Hundred of illegal workers are shown crammed into a derelict concrete structure where they live without electricity, running water, or basic sanitation facilities, and wait on street corners each morning in hope of being picked up for a day of construction work. The work is unpredictable, and workers appear to find work three days a week at best. It is a deeply moving film that reveals another tragic and compelling dimension to the Israeli occupation issue. In a presentation following the film, the directors emphasized that the Palestinians involved in the film wished only for a solution to the Israeli occupation that would allow them to have reliable work each day and the luxury of returning home to their families after work each night. This artfully crafted documentary presents a provocative narrative that I highly recommend to anyone remotely interested in social issues in general or Palestinian-Israeli issues in particular.