The Playgoer: Mer Khamis' Freedom Theatre

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Monday, April 11, 2011

Mer Khamis' Freedom Theatre

As a follow-up to last week's story of the murder of Palestinian actor/director Juliano Mer Khamis by Arab militants, here is a five-minute documentary profiling his "Freedom Theatre" in the West Bank--an arts center and school for Palestinian children.  As he movingly pleads at one point to the (implied) Western audience of the film, "We are not terrorists." Then, last week, as if to make a terrible point, he was killed by terrorists. You'd never know from these clips that he was soft on the Israeli occupation. But his genius was to use the model of artistic collaboration as a model for peaceful co-existence.


Also on You Tube is Mer Khamis's 90-minute film Arna's Children about his Jewish-Israeli mother and their founding of the Freedom Theatre together.

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