Lia Tarachansky: Seven Deadly Myths

Seven Deadly Myths – OFFICIAL TRAILER
from Naretiv Productions.

When the government tries to silence a history, a light is shed on the nation’s biggest taboo. This is the story of those who fought to erase Palestine and created an Israeli landscape of denial. For more info: www.sevendeadlymyths.com

SYNOPSIS

Having grown up in Ariel, Lia Tarachansky speaks about segregation. While situated deep in the West Bank, the settlement is completely isolated from its surroundings and the nearby Palestinian villages. “It was like living on an island suspended from the sky by strings”, she says in an upcoming ground-breaking documentary that looks at Israeli collective identity through the prism of its biggest taboo – what happened in 1948. It was this very history the government attempted to silence when in 2009 a new law proposal suggested a three-year jail term for anyone who looks at the events of that year critically.

It was then, three years after the holocaust that the nascent Jewish state was created in a bloody war that led to two-thirds of the Palestinian people becoming refugees. Those who fled or were expelled to this day remain in camps throughout the Arab world, the West Bank and Gaza. In her film, Tarachansky follows Israeli veterans of that war as they struggle to untangle their memory and years of denial in an erased landscape of segregation. Drawing a clear line between the events of that year and the continuation of that displacement today, the film revolutionizes the way we see the conflict.

While the law proposal passed parliament, it failed to silence criticism over what happened 1948, instead sparking a nation-wide debate and a movement of historians and journalists to explore what that history means for Israel’s national narrative. This May Israel marks 65 years since that year when the Middle East was changed forever and the modern conflict took on its present form. Through her personal story of “seeing” the Palestinians for the first time, Tarachansky captures a rarely-seen inside look into why Israelis do what they do, and how they see themselves in the changing Middle East.

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