Published: 1 March 2022
Last updated: 4 March 2024
Australian-made doco The Narrow Bridge follows two Palestinians and two Israelis, who lost a loved one in the conflict, and have channelled grief into a bridge for reconciliation
THE NARROW BRIDGE follows the paths of four people, two Palestinian and two Israeli, who lost a child or parent in the conflict and have transformed their grief into a bridge for reconciliation.
Bushra, Rami, Meytal and Bassam, belong to a controversial grassroots movement of broken-hearted people ‘Israeli Palestinian Bereaved Families,’ who have turned personal trauma into public activism.
This Australian-made documentary, by Melbourne filmmaker Esther Takac, which screens in this year’s Jewish International Film Festival, chronicles their campaign to build a just future together in the face of fierce political and family opposition.
The story of the friendship between Rami Elhanan, an Israeli graphic designer, and Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian academic, is by now well known. They met in 2005 at the birth of Combatants for Peace, the organisation Bassam co-founded with Rami’s son Elik.
Bassam was a Palestinian freedom fighter who spent seven years in an Israeli jail, from the age of 17, and became a prisoners’ leader. After watching the movie Schindler’s List in prison, he embraced non-violent resistance.
In 2007, Bassam’s daughter Abir was shot in the back of her head outside her school in a town in the West Bank. Rami went straight to the hospital, and spent two days by her bed.
Abir, the third of Bassam’s six children, was born in 1997, the same year Rami’s daughter Smadar was killed in a suicide bombing by Palestinian terrorists in Jerusalem. Smadar was the third of his four children. “What happened to Abir, for me, was like losing my daughter a second time,” he told Good Weekend magazine in an interview in 2020.
