Screening and discussion with the film makers (30.05.2006)

"We Too Have No Other Land"

A documentary by Jerrold Kessel and Pierre Klochendler

"A society is best judged by how it relates to its Minorities"
(Ralph Waldo Emerson)

We Too Have No Other Land is a soccer-based documentary about life around a unique soccer pitch. Neither political treatise nor sociological thesis, nor even sports story, this is live human drama; it kicks-off in Galilee, but scores goals all around Israel and its Arab neighbors.

"We Too Have No Other land", directed by Jerrold Kessel and Pierre Klochendler, 59min., Hebrew&Arabic, English subtitles, 2006

Bnei Sakhnin (' The Sons of Sakhnin') is an Arab village club, Cinderellas in soccer boots, winners of Israel’s State Cup…. the players of our intimate story which records Sakhnin’s fight for survival in the country’s top soccer division – on and off the pitch.

One of every five Israelis is an Arab; they are part of a minority split between their desire to be fully integrated citizens of their state - Israel, and a desire to be wholly linked to their people - the Palestinians. Some Jews see them as a ‘fifth column’, others as a potential bridge to peace. Many in the Arab world adjudge them to be ‘collaborators’. Winning on the soccer pitch allows Sakhnin to determine what role they want to play and what challenges they pose - to Jewish Israelis, to fellow Palestinians, to the Arab world, to anyone indeed who cares about the scoring of equal rights. Can the cardinal issues of discrimination, equality, identity and co-existence be squared into the one round ball?

Theirs is a poignant challenge. Several players and the coach are Jewish. “We are more than a club, we are a family,” declares Sakhnin boss Mazen Ghnaim. Harbingers of harmony they may be. But make no mistake, in pursuit of their goals, they play tough. This is real life coexistence, not sentimental Hollywood stuff. It is the ultimate Majority-Minority match.

During the years of the bitter Intifada conflict any willingness of Israelis and Palestinians to understand the historic ‘pain’ of the other side was swept away. Each side has become more and more entrenched in its own pain, more and more oblivious to the other side’s pain. And, the Israeli Arabs are caught in the middle, suffering the pain of both sides, unable to provide a bridge of compassion between the two warring sides. Now, does their soccer success perhaps hold out hope that if they cannot be a bridge for peace, can they at least provide a model for existence, a model for both Jews and Arabs, for Israelis and Palestinians alike?

We Too Have No Other Land is a documentary of a season of delight and of pain, of dreams and of fears, of how the weak stand up to the strong.

The Film Makers:

Jerrold Kessel is a sports addict; Pierre Klochendler thinks himself as anything but a soccer aficionado. Together, for more than a decade as CNN’s Jerusalem-based Middle East reporter/producer team, they dribbled along many lines of defense in war and peace.
Now, offside in the Sakhnin locker-room, they confront an alternative view of this troubled pitch. The focus of their filmmaking and journalism is now exploring “the other in our midst” - (hence the name of the company “The Other Films”. Here they try to grapple with the interplay between intolerance and social harmony, between denial and coexistence, the kind of coexistence suggested by the Bnei Sakhnin symbol of an Arab stallion trapping a soccer ball, coexistence as spelt out by the club’s “foreign minister” Ibrahim Bushnak, “not that between horse and rider where one rides and the other is ridden, but coexistence between two equal parties existing together in equality.”