My neighborhood is both Muhammad al-Quds neighborhood, which is the protagonist of the film, and also our neighborhood, because about eight years ago,
I moved to Shirshara, I'm no longer in Jerusalem, but I moved to establish an editing room to work on my first documentary film in the region.
And at the time, there were a couple of already Israeli settlements there and a few flags that you could see, but it was nowhere what you see today in the neighborhood.
And so over the following eight years, I've really personally witnessed together with my Israeli and Palestinian colleagues the transformation of this neighborhood.
So, thank you all for coming. The story is always a special area that makes me more interested.
I have to be honest that now when I watched the film again, I thought about, wow, it was just two years ago and so many things have changed in Israel.
And especially I thought about the demonstration, how back then it was, I don't know, the demonstration was violent, but not as violent as it is right now.
The situation was a little less extreme as it is right now.
And I think that it's always challenging to wake up in the morning and say to yourself, I believe in human rights and I believe in nonviolent resistance.
And we saw that what was beginning to happen in Shacharach was opening the space for Israelis who had never been active before to actually take part.
So the Israelis who would go into Budrus were sort of radical left of Israel.
And the Israelis that go into Shacharach are the more mainstream left, still left, but more mainstream.
And so you see a bit of an opening for more people to get engaged and for the conversation to become a little bit more acceptable.
And for the discourse around Shacharach, for there to be a conversation.
Now overall, Israeli society and Israeli government is not going left. It's pretty steadily going right.
And at the same time, you do see that in the last eight years, there has been an increase in activism in civil society level, nonviolent direct actions of multiple legal justifications for each one of the actions.
In the last period, the Israeli human rights activists become a target.
And I think that you can see that it's increasing. It's becoming not popular or not allowed anymore to protest.
Freedom of speech is becoming more narrow in Israel.
That justifies the occupation.
I don't want to speak politics. When people ask me about my views, of course I have political views.
But I'm always saying the answer that I used to say as a spoke person of amnesty, that I'm not politics.
I'm not doing anything government. I don't want to deal with government. I just want to deal with people.
It's not a question of black writing. We need to go. It was a small protest that it was covered in every...
