Amos Gitai brings Khan al-Ahmar’s threatened school to Venice
The Road to Jericho combines a portrait of a Palestinian Bedouin school in the occupied West Bank with four decades of archival footage.
Israeli director Amos Gitai is presenting The Road to Jericho at the Venice Film Festival, a documentary centred on Khan al-Ahmar’s threatened “school of tires” and the plight of Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
The school, in a Palestinian Bedouin village between Jerusalem and Jericho, reportedly serves around 300 children. The Guardian reports that it has operated for eight years under threat of demolition after Israeli authorities denied an official building permit and deemed the settlement illegal.
Gitai says he first filmed at Khan al-Ahmar about 10 years ago, where he was moved by the perseverance of the community. He wanted to use filmmaking to defend the school, which he says has remained open partly because of international pressure.
The film combines the school’s present-day story with archival material spanning roughly 40 years, including footage of Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin during the 1990s Oslo accords. Gitai also revisits his own history as a filmmaker, including Field Diary, his 1982 documentary about Gaza before the Lebanon War.
Gitai describes The Road to Jericho as elliptical and poetic rather than overtly polemical. He says cinema cannot directly change reality, but can “scratch a memory” and carry ideas — a position that places the film within Venice’s wider focus on the Middle East, alongside NAZA and the VR documentary Raj’in (We Shall Return).
