SUMMARY
It’s 1987, and the first Intifada is rising. In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Palestinian residents want local alternatives to Israeli goods, including milk, which they have been buying from an Israeli company. Activists in filmmaker Amer Shomali’s village of Beit Sahour, a suburb of Bethlehem, decide to buy 18 cows and produce their own milk as a cooperative. They purchase 18 cows from an Israeli kibbutz and transport them to the West Bank.
The cows became legendary and the “Intifada milk” (sometimes distributed under cover of darkness) becomes a part of daily life. But this act of defiance does not go unnoticed. The Israeli Army raids the dairy, photographs the cows, and declares the farm a threat to Israel’s national security.
Employing an impressive mixture of media—claymation, comic strips, reenactment, archived video footage, sketches, photographs, interviews and voiceover narration, this ingenious documentary captures the spirit of the first Palestinian uprising through the personal experiences of those who lived it—and provides an enchanting, inspirational tribute to the ingenuity and power of grassroots activism.
GALLERY
