A Taxi with a View - Director's Statement

Man has always desired to cross the borders, often pushed by the need to survive, and nowdays it has become more and more difficult.

Ryszard Kapuscinski has written in his book “Imperium”  “… the border is stress-fear, even, significantly more rarely: liberation.”

“A Taxi with a View” has been shot in Jerusalem and its surrounding Palestinian Territories, the taxi drivers of Jerusalem circulates in an area of the world that is little bigger than my region, and if they are Arab citizens of Israel, they conveying people to their destinations also in the Territories.

The documentary describes the situation in the area and the lack of freedom of movement, through the relationship and the normal, everyday chatter between taxi drivers and their customers during the journeys from Jerusalem to the Territories and the attempts by the common people to overcome barriers, real, political and psychological.

Their talks cover a wide range of topics, from private aspects such as their origin, their employment status or family, to the contingent situation.

They are persons that, despite themselves, are often pawns in games they fail to understand. The prohibitions are often mental barriers, beliefs and fears, not merely written rules based on passports, identity cards and passes, in an area where fear and diffidence have materialized in the construction of a wall with a path twisted and bizarre. The taxi becomes a "neutral" territory of meetings and the route of travel allows us to see the landscape, the "outside".

The stories of the protagonists are alternated with an interview to Munther Fahmi, the palestinian bookstore owner's library at the American Colony in Jerusalem. He try to explains the difficulties of movement on the basis of different ID documents of local residents.

What strikes me most, beyond the sadness and pain felt for the slow and steady loss of human lives, in this small space with a unique density of cultural, religious and political issue, is the absurd.