Based on David Hare’s play of the same name, Wall was shot in live action, then adapted with rotoscope animation. The documentary opens on a British Airways jet landing at Ben-Gurion Airport, after which Hare spends the next 80 minutes grappling with the moral and material consequences of the Israeli West Bank barrier. He speaks with Israeli and Palestinian artists and intellectuals in an effort to see both sides of the issue, though Hare—and everyone else in the film—sees the wall as a problem to be solved, not a (lasting) solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In examining the present state of the conflict, Wall says nothing that hasn’t already been covered in dozens of other films on the subject.
Unique to the film, though, is its implication that Hare is a tourist in what he repeatedly refers to as the “holy land.” Several moments remind us that Hare is an Englishman whose stake in the conflict is sentimental and fleeting. The plane that carries him to Israel at the start of the film also serves as a reminder of British colonialism in the region and how it prevented Jews fleeing the Holocaust from settling in the area. When a Palestinian reminds Hare of the British Mandate for Palestine, the playwright reacts as if this is the first time he’s ever heard of such a thing. Hare, like Lawrence of Arabia, comes off as a “desert-loving English,” a vacation activist who will return home to England once his tour is over. Perhaps needless to say, the film ends with Hare on another British Airways jet, this one departing Ben-Gurion Airport.
Hare’s inquiry into the consequences of the wall begins on the Israeli side of the barrier, physically and psychologically. Israeli “doves” bemoan the wall while admitting that it’s thwarted suicide bombings. A reenactment of one such gruesome attack reminds the audience why the wall was put up in the first place. Over in the West Bank, director Cam Christiansen shows the daily indignities that Palestinians suffer at the hands of Israeli security forces. However, Hare reminds his audience and his Palestinian interlocutors of Hamas’s violence against its own citizens. Regular Palestinians are implied to be complicit in this violence when Hare points out a picture of Saddam Hussein at a popular café in Nablus, the sole decoration on its wall. Hare asks, “Why would anyone look to Saddam Hussein as a role model?”
Christiansen’s decision to use rotoscope ultimately adds little to the proceedings; it’s as if the choice was made to spice up the prosaic with a dash of the uncanny. Hare himself at times tries to use aesthetics to make sense of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but it’s to ill effect. For one, his argument that the modernization of Jerusalem has somehow destroyed the city’s ancient beauty is willfully naïve at best, racist at worst. In the end, Hare’s critique of the urban development of this “holy city” could be applied to any city with an expanding population.
After singling out Jerusalem for destroying its heritage by accommodating its growing populace, Hare goes about finding beauty in the graffiti on the Palestinian side of the wall, which Christiansen dutifully animates in one of the few uses of color in his otherwise black-and-white production. One particular drawing glorifying hijacker Leila Khaled is emphasized by the camera but isn’t acknowledged by Hare in his commentary. By unknowingly venerating this terrorist, this moment, like the rest of the documentary, only serves to highlight Hare’s confusion as a tourist in a conflict he can never fully comprehend.
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