Heeb

I’ll be honest. I didn’t know much about the evacuation of Gaza when I hunkered down to watch Unsettled, nor had I heard or read anything about the film itself. Which is probably why I liked it. That and the fact that the director followed the basic rules of documentary filmmaking (take note, Michael Moore) and presented all sides of the story without sticking his own views in.

Ooh, except for the Palestinian view, that gets left out. BUT, to his credit, director Adam Hootnick still manages to present most sides of the story through interviews with a laid-back Israeli surfer who lives in a Jewish settlement in Gaza because of its beauty not his ideology, two Israeli soldiers dealing with having to forcibly remove their countrymen from their homes, two religious settlers who feel that God gave them the land and told them not to make treaties with their neighbors, a young Israeli woman whose sister was killed by a suicide bomber and who feels that it’s unfair for everyone in the country to be under constant threat when only a small percentage of the population want to live in Gaza and an Israeli woman whose son is one of the soldiers tasked with removing people and asking the Gaza settlers to accept the "unsettlement" peacefully.

Each person’s story has a basic human truth to it, so much so that it’s hard not to identify and empathize with all of them at the same time, which places the viewer in exactly the "Shit, there’s no solution to this that will make everyone happy," place that the subjects have found themselves in.

If you want to check it out for yourself, the film opened at the Pioneer Theater in New York May 9, and opens at Laemmle’s Music Hall 3 in LA tomorrow, and the DVD is available for sale online.