The Israeli-Palestinian conflict on a family scale

In the face of the terrible situation that is stoking and inflaming the already gaping wounds of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we wanted to bring back the work of Montreal-based Israeli filmmaker Danae Elon. The daughter of a couple of intellectuals who went into exile in Italy, the renowned Israeli journalist Amos Elon and the former literary agent Beth Elon, Danae's documentary practice is intrinsically linked to the geopolitical stakes of the region. She delivered this message: "I write these words trembling with pain and despair for all that is happening in Israel/Palestine. My work has been dedicated to this bloody conflict, searching for ways to understand, feel and express the deepest complexities of the pain it has caused. Another Road Home is a film I made just after September 11. It was the desperate need to search for our mutual humanity that prompted me to set off in search of the sons of the Palestinian man who raised me. I immersed myself in the pain of the occupation from a deeply personal point of view. Ten years later, I made P.S. Jerusalem, a film that brought my family back to Palestine/Israel despite all the warnings that it wasn't the right thing to do. I knew this, but the same necessity that drove me to make Another Road Home applied to this trip. Last Saturday, when war broke out, my soul was overcome by a profound sense of relief, for I knew that my sons, now 18 and living in Montreal, would inevitably have been conscripted into this senseless carnage. Enlisted in this brutality. I spared them the pain, I spared them a lifetime of making sense of that pain. Above all, I spared them from being part of it. We were lucky, but others are not. Our friends and family are deeply wounded, and we fear that the worst is yet to come. My personal work in film is a spiritual quest to find answers to the most tragic and painful circumstances of our lives. I include my family in my films to question the role we play in the choices we make. To question the roles we play in the societies we're born into. But what I'm really trying to do is find hope and protect what I understand to be our own humanity." Danae Elon, filmmaker

In the face of the terrible situation that is stoking and inflaming the already gaping wounds of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we wanted to bring back the work of Montreal-based Israeli filmmaker Danae Elon. The daughter of a couple of intellectuals who went into exile in Italy, the renowned Israeli journalist Amos Elon and the former literary agent Beth Elon, Danae's documentary practice is intrinsically linked to the geopolitical stakes of the region. She delivered this message:

"I write these words trembling with pain and despair for all that is happening in Israel/Palestine. My work has been dedicated to this bloody conflict, searching for ways to understand, feel and express the deepest complexities of the pain it has caused. Another Road Home is a film I made just after September 11. It was the desperate need to search for our mutual humanity that prompted me to set off in search of the sons of the Palestinian man who raised me. I immersed myself in the pain of the occupation from a deeply personal point of view. Ten years later, I made P.S. Jerusalem, a film that brought my family back to Palestine/Israel despite all the warnings that it wasn't the right thing to do. I knew this, but the same necessity that drove me to make Another Road Home applied to this trip. Last Saturday, when war broke out, my soul was overcome by a profound sense of relief, for I knew that my sons, now 18 and living in Montreal, would inevitably have been conscripted into this senseless carnage. Enlisted in this brutality. I spared them the pain, I spared them a lifetime of making sense of that pain. Above all, I spared them from being part of it. We were lucky, but others are not. Our friends and family are deeply wounded, and we fear that the worst is yet to come. My personal work in film is a spiritual quest to find answers to the most tragic and painful circumstances of our lives. I include my family in my films to question the role we play in the choices we make. To question the roles we play in the societies we're born into. But what I'm really trying to do is find hope and protect what I understand to be our own humanity."

Danae Elon, filmmaker