It was just released to the world on Vimeo:
In Defense of the Rocket - dir. Martin Ginestié (2015) from Martin Ginestie on Vimeo.
The film is offensive on two levels.
One is that it pretends that Israel bombs Gaza for no reason, and that rockets are a natural reaction to the failure of the peace process that Israel's random attacks have killed. It doesn't show any rockets themselves until after it shows bombed-out Gaza buildings. The viewer would have no idea that Hamas rockets are aimed towards civilians and that thousands of them, shot after Israel withdrew from Gaza, preceded any military action.
The second reason it is offensive is that it is simply a poor film. It literally looks like it was made in Microsoft Movie and Martin Ginestié couldn't even sync up the photos with the music in several instances.
The poorly made piece of pro-Palestinian terror propaganda "In Defense of the Rocket" was shown at these film festivals:
- International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) - Netherlands - 2015
- 9180 Shortfest - India - 2015
- True / False - USA - 2016
- Internationale Kurzfilmwoche Regensburg - Germany - 2016
- Athens International Film + Video Festival - USA - 2016
- cellu l'art - Germany - 2016
- Leiden International Short Film Experience - Netherlands - 2016
- Hot Docs - Canada - 2016
- Festival Internacional De Cine De Huesca - Spain - 2016
- Sarajevo Film Festival - Bosnia Herzegovina - 2016
- off-courts Trouville - France - 2016
- Fantoche International Animation Film Festival Baden - Switzerland - 2016
- Milan Film Festival - Italy - 2016
- Camden International Film Festival - USA - 2016
- Riga International Film Festival 2ANNAS - Latvia 2016
- The Living Art - Italy - 2016
- Sapporo International Short Film Festival - Japan - 2016
- DEPO2015 - Czech Republic - 2016
- DocsDF - Mexico - 2016
- Croydon IFF - UK - 2016
- Jogja-NETPAC - Indonesia - 2016
- Istanbul International Short Film Festival - Turkey - 2106 [sic]
It is proudly promoted by the British Film Council.
Ginestié spoke to Electronic Intifada (which naturally supports the terrorism romanticized in the film) :
“At festivals, I’ve definitely got people being offended by the title,” Ginestie said. “But that was the purpose.”Anyone who frames Israel's withdrawal from Gaza, Israeli citizens being bombarded by rockets and Israel finally fighting back after years of inaction as "colonization" is an imbecile.
“The moment of inspiration for the film was the bombing of Gaza in 2014, because I was just trying to find something positive from that event,” Ginestie added. “It was very hard to find anything positive.”
“The ambition of the film was to provoke Western liberals – at the time there was a lot of sympathy for Palestinians but very little sympathy for armed resistance,” Ginestie added. “That was kind of a red line. I wanted to provoke people, not to support armed resistance – it’s not for us to decide how Palestinians resist colonization – but to get people to reframe the Western debate about the use of violence.”
“I wanted to make a film that retraced the past 20 years of Palestinian politics and give some kind of historical logic for what the Palestinian resistance was doing,” Ginestie said.
And anyone who says that Palestinians have the right to murder Jews in the name of "resisting colonization" if they choose but Israelis don't have the right to defend themselves is a hypocrite.
Yet a score of film festivals think that a poorly made piece of pro-terror propaganda is worth showing - because supporting terror against Jews is now considered "provocative" "art."
The final frame of the film, showing an animation of a wonderful "resistance rocket" soaring in the sky above what the viewer would believe was a devastated Gaza, is actually taken from a photo of a Jordanian refugee camp in 1949 near the Dead Sea.
Today that camp is still there, under Palestinian Authority rule. No documentary filmmakers are asking why Palestinians keep their own people in "refugee camps" in territory that has been under their control for over two decades.
There is no market for such films.
