Open Bethlehem (PG), directed by Leila Sansour

4/5

As the world waits for the star of Bethlehem to illuminate a lowly stable, Israel is still making it difficult to enter that holy city.

That’s what Christian film director Leila Sansour discovered when she returned to her homeland to make a film about the town as the Israeli authorities were building a vast concentration camp.

How else to describe a walled compound intended to imprison people and cut them off from the rest of the world?

The horror grows when you consider that Bethlehem, which attracts pilgrims from all over the world, has battlements twice the size of the Berlin Wall and settlements that house zionists who refuse to move and who destroy the olive groves and homes of Palestinians.

Sansour is the daughter of a former head of Bethlehem University and intifada leader who left to train in Moscow and then Paris to escape his shadow and fashion her own career.

But, as she drives around, she’s increasingly reminded that she should take up his banner and contribute to organising the resistance.

After much discussion with others, in a land they say has no democracy, they move from demonstrations to coming up with the idea of Open Bethlehem, a campaign to save the city.

Combining archive footage and docudrama spanning seven years, the project initially attracted international solidarity from the Catholic Church in Rome and other faith and human rights organisations.

Such a simple matter you might imagine, given the financial rewards from Christian tourism and others who wish to see Bethlehem before it becomes a fortified bunker.

Given the zionist predilection for creating such genocidal ghettos, it still shocks the world that Israel can commit war crimes with impunity, aided and abetted by the US.

Films such as Open Bethlehem contribute to the culture of resistance, illustrating the imagination required to combat an army and a nuclear Goliath with slingshots.

The struggle of Sansour and her peers to alert the world to the atrocities is a reminder that people power continues to respond to incessant zionist provocation.

That next light over Bethlehem might just be a warhead striking home.