Film Festival Film #4: The Gatekeepers

[bcholmes]

The Gatekeepers has been the most powerful film I’ve seen so far. At first, I was a bit wary of it — it’s a documentary about the Israeli security agency, Shin Bet, in the style of The Fog of War, and I feared that this would be an attempt to humanize the people who plan out state-authorized atrocity. The director interviews the six most-recent former heads of Shin Bet and gets them talking about some of the big anti-terrorism cases of the last number of years. And what they say is really quite interesting.

They don’t say simple things. They describe, candidly, that for much of their history, they had no notion of an “illegal order”. They seem like people who’ve all come to terms with living in a world of shades of grey, and least harm and crap like that. They’re upfront about assassinations, and missile strikes, and collateral damage. And yet they’re not unaware of “the banality of evil” and are quite thoughtful about the efficacy (or lack thereof) of their brand of terror-fighting and about the political impossibility of any other approach.

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Mirrored from Under the Beret.

Comments

[kalmn]

have you watched mi-5 at all? i very much liked the show, and i thought the first few seasons especially really addressed that collateral damage/politics/doing what you think needs to be done discussion.


(i liked the later seasons as well, but a few of them tended a little towards OH NOES BROWN PEOPLES.) (although should you watch the whole thing, we have to talk. because spoiler spoiler spoiler and oh yeah spoiler.)

[bcholmes]

Yeah, I've seen all of MI-5. I quite liked it, but I was always felt -- especially during the early seasons -- that it was a bit scrubbed up to make it palatable to left-wingers. There's an early episode where Harry, succinctly, describes the mission of MI-5 as maintaining the status quo. But then, not long after that, there's an episode where Harry learns that a Cabinet Minister murdered his mistress, and he gets all high and mighty about it. Me, I could never suspend my disbelief that an organization devoted to maintaining the status quo wouldn't have helped cover up that incident.

I suppose I wanted it to be a bit bleaker than it was. And, yeah, it was mighty bleak, at times. Some of the character deaths were heart-breaking. Me, I'm thinking people like Jo and Danny. But I thought that a lot of their actions were too safe.

Oh, and when I grow up, I want to be Roz.

[kalmn]

We all want to be roz!

Ruuuuuuuuuth! Is what I have to say. I thought it was sort of an anti refrigerator ending.