Documentarian Eyal Sivan is a political filmmaker with a keen and passionately critical eye for the workings of power on many levels, whether witnessed directly or discerned through the fashioning of history and ideology through the use of images. Born in Israel in 1964, he began his career as a photographer in Tel Aviv before moving to Paris in 1985 and taking up filmmaking; to date, he has made fifteen films and divides his time between Europe and Israel. Although Sivan’s films critical of Israeli expansionism and treatment of the Palestinians have attracted a great deal of attention and controversy, this is only one facet of his work, albeit a central one. Films such as Akabat Jaber – Passing Through (1987), the portrait of a Palestinian refugee camp, and Itsembatsemba (1996), about the Rwandan genocide, are powerful examples of the observational documentary. Sivan returned to this side of his filmmaking with Route 181, included in our program. But Sivan is also a skillful practitioner in the genre of the essay film constructed from archival footage. We will be showing two excellent examples: The Specialist (1999) and the recent Jaffa, The Orange’s Clockwork (2009). — David Pendleton