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features /  film interview
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private
private interview
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Filmmaker Saverio Costanzo on his (house) arresting drama.

As yet another news report of a Palestinian suicide bomber or an Israeli tank attack unfolds on our television screens, heads and hearts slump in despair. What can be done in the face of such savage, vengeance-fuelled hostility? Well, 30-year-old writer/director Saverio Costanzo made a film.

Private is based on the real-life story of a well-to-do Palestinian family unfortunate enough to live between Israeli settlements and an Arab village. One day, seemingly from nowhere, Israeli soldiers move into their home for “security reasons”. The family father, Mohammad, refuses to leave, subjecting himself and his family to an uneasy occupation, and splintering family loyalties.



The resulting tale is an intense power struggle fraught with tension and the hair-trigger risk of bloodshed. A home becomes a prison, though the prisoners reject possible escape, and Costanzo builds the claustrophobic suspense at every turn. “I know how to manage things in one location. I don’t know how to shoot exteriors,” he laughs modestly. “This is a heavy story, but you don’t have to let the audience get bored.”

Shooting on Mini DV and with a budget of scraps, the film almost feels like the outtakes of a news report that was never filed. “The only way to be objective in this movie is to be subjective,” Costanzo maintains, explaining his scrupulous avoidance of rhetoric. “In that case you had to take a point of view.” Tellingly, we see solely what the family sees, only getting an inside view on the occupying Israelis when, in heart-stopping sequences, the eldest daughter Mariam spies on them from a cupboard. “In the first half you see the brutality of the soldiers,” continues Costanzo. “Then you start to understand them along with her. But it’s important that somebody is taking you up there.”



Astonishingly, for all its visual verisimilitude, the film was shot in Calabria, Italy, creating, as Costanzo puts it, “another reality that doesn’t belong to Israel or to Palestine, but to the film”. Screening it in either country is another controversial step, despite Private’s numerous international awards.

But, despite some Israeli audiences naming it “a masterpiece of sensibility”, Costanzo isn’t anticipating unilateral acclaim. “If you are ideological, you will not like the movie,” he says bluntly. “I believe nobody from Hammas will like this movie, and nobody from the Likud party will like this movie.” Which presumably means he must be doing something right.


Leigh Singer 13 May 05
Private, on selected release 13 May 05.
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