Two Kids a Day

Most children arrested come from strong and prominent families in villages close to Jewish settlements. Families that rise up agains the occupation. Arresting their children makes them go silent, and scared. Arresting their children suppresses the resistance.

About 700 Palestinian minors are arrested and jailed every year by the Israeli security forces in the West Bank. They are taken from their homes at night and interrogated, with mental and physical pressure, which violate international law. Almost all of them are convicted and sent to prison.

Blindfolding, painful handcuffing, sleep prevention. Long, undocumented interrogations with no lawyer, no interpreter and no parental presence. These human rights violations have been documented in numerous reports over the years, but the system remains mostly unchanged. Palestinian minors are trailed in the military court system, which is completely different than the system for Jewish minors.

The security forces exploit this fragile point of Palestinian resistance to curb any uprising, mostly in the villages closest to Jewish settlements.
Most children, aged 11 to 17, break under pressure and forgo their right to remain silent. They are pushed to confess and turn in their friends. They agree to plea bargains, and most serve a prison term without having their day in court.

From the perspective of Israel's security system, mass juvenile arrest is an extremely effective and relatively non-violent measure. For Palestinian society, the damage is permanent. 75% of jailed minors are bound to return to prison. There is no rehabilitation system, and their opportunities for a better life are extremely limited. Some grow into armed fighters, willing to die for their cause.

The dramatic core of the film is video recorded interrogations, which are as chilling as they are monotonous and dry. Scared boys confronted with rough questioning, meant to break them down. Years later, as young men, they reflect on the ways this experience had shaped them. These heart wrenching stories will be framed with poignant interviews with the people who run the system: a soldier who detained children, the judge who ruled on their case, Israeli and Palestinians lawyers who represent them and the West Bank's chief prosecutor. Along with the interviews and archive materials will show juvenile arrests in real time.

The film shows the inner workings of the system: a demonstration or stone throwing in a nearby road is the pretext for a wave of nightly arrests of children, terrorizing the whole village. The threat of arrest also serves to recruit new informants. Thus, the youth is coerced into collaborating with security forces, further tearing the social fabric of the village and crushing solidarity.

We show the widening circles of trauma, touching not only the detained children themselves, but their family and village, the soldiers who arrest them, the settlers who live nearby, the Israeli justice system, and finally, the entire Israeli society. Through the stories of young men looking back at their filmed interrogations, the film poses difficult questions: Do mass arrests really contribute to security? And is this course of action legitimate, from a legal and moral standpoint?

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Muhamad, one of the film's protagonists, was 16 when he was arrested and charged of stone throwing. Filmed from an high angle, he is seen terrified, detained for the first time in his life. The interrogator asks him to name his classmates. "Why are you afraid to say their names?" he demands. "Most of them are in jail anyway. Who do you play soccer with?" Suddenly hitting the table, the interrogator warns Muhamad, who says nothing, not to play games with him. The interrogator now shouts: "Tell me who you played with!".
After an eight-month prison sentence, Muhamad is released. Like many others, he has a hard time readjusting to his former routine of school and family life and is soon jailed again. The film meets him three years later, as a young man. Looking back, he recounts the events of that first traumatic arrest. His story is that of a whole generation of young Palestinians. In 2015, for example, 1,210 cases were brought to the military juvenile court. 633 of them were on charges of "obstructing the order" (stone throwing), 363 of "Hostile terroristic activity", 43 of illegal stay, 95 for traffic violations and only 76 for generic criminal offences.
This is a generation of children born into popular resistance to occupation. While the adults in the village are engulfed in a fierce struggle against military rule and settler attacks, the younger generation is compelled to join.

The film sheds light on the fact that 95% of arrested minors are from villages adjacent to Jewish settlements. Ostensibly, the arrests are a security measure, but there's an underlying systemic purpose: to suppress the resistance particularly in those villages most prone to violent confrontations with settlers. Mass juvenile arrests create in these Palestinian villages a constant state of anxiety, debilitating uncertainty and constant deterrence.

Jerusalem Int. Film Festival (Best Research Award), IDFA FORUM Central Pitch, Norwegian HRF (intl. premiere), Grand Prix Japan Prize