The Syracuse University Human Rights Film Festival celebrates 20 years with an outstanding lineup of award-winning films addressing social justice issues around the globe. The screening of Tantura is supported by the Atrocity Studies and the Practices of Social Justice minor. A Q&A will the filmmaker follows the screening.
When the State of Israel was established in 1948, war broke out and hundreds of Palestinian villages were depopulated in its aftermath. Israelis know this as the War of Independence while Palestinians call it Al Nakba (the Catastrophe). This is a story about one such village: Tantura. In the 1990s, Israeli graduate student Teddy Katz conducted research into a large-scale massacre that had allegedly occurred in Tantura. His work later came under attack and his academic career ruined. Director Alon Schwarz revisits former Israeli soldiers of the Alexandroni Brigade and Palestinian residents to re-examine what happened in Tantura, and explores the taboo around the Nakba in Israeli society and the national inability to come to terms with its dark past.