The Viewing Booth / Film School Radio interview with Director Ra’anan Alexandrowicz

Prior to World War I a friend writes to Virginia Woolf asking about how to prevent the coming war. She replies… by asking him about the definition of we. When we look at a series of photographs, do we see the same thing? THE VIEWING BOOTH recounts a unique encounter between a filmmaker and a viewer — exploring the way meaning is attributed to non-fiction images in today’s day and age. In a lab-like location, Maia Levy, a young Jewish American woman, watches videos portraying life in the occupied West Bank, while verbalizing her thoughts and feelings in real time. Maia is an enthusiastic supporter of Israel, and the images in the videos, depicting Palestinian life under Israeli military rule, contradict some of her deep-seated beliefs. Empathy, anger, embarrassment, innate biases, and healthy curiosity — all play out before our eyes as we watch her watch the images created by the Occupation. As Maia navigates and negotiates the images, which threaten her worldview, she also reflects on the way she sees them. Her candid and immediate reactions form a one-of-a-kind cinematic testimony to the psychology of the viewer in the digital era. THE VIEWING BOOTH is director Ra'anan Alexandrowicz (The Law In These Parts) joins us for a in-depth conversation regarding his inspiration and his motivation for creating a rigorous social / cultural / political evaluation of the way in which people take in, process and contextualize image-based information and how they see the world around them. For news and updates go to: theviewingboothfilm.com/en/the-film It will open at New York’s Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI) on Friday, August 6. The theatrical run will be preceded by a July 30 screening at MoMI’s First Look FF and followed by streaming access on the BBC REEL platform on August 18.