Director’s note:

“Baladi’-This is my village was born during a trip to the West bank with the Ong Overseas, which manages projects of International Cooperation in the agricultural sector. The material we collected allowed us to give voice to the people we met during our stay in the small village of Wadi Fukin: men, women and children who told us about the difficulties, the abuses, the hopes, the defeats of a people forced to to live a perennial condition of uncertainty and suspension. The act of filming is very painful for me, just as the act of pulling the camera out is likely to be an act of violence. For this reason, before doing so, we worked for days with the villagers, mostly peasants, who gradually accepted our presence and gradually established a relationship of trust with us. It is always necessary to have filled the process of approaching both with the characters and their stories. This patience allows you to feel the right distance between the subject and the camera, in which corner to position it, how to compose the frame and whether to use the camera by hand or a tripod. When I finally understand that it’s time to shoot, I feel I have found the right distance and in the triangulation between those who film, the video camera and the character, something more complex than simple observation or staging will emerge: a feeling of reality, a a singular and unrepeatable truth that springs precisely from this encounter.”
Cristiano Regina