Film Review Magazine
August 2003
Review by Neil Corry



Comedian takes on the world’s fourth largest army



I wasn’t a fan of comedian Jeremy Hardy. He comes across as pollock, but that must be his stand up comedy stage persona. Or that I’m just not very tolerant. So when this tape arrived of Hardy’s involvement with the International Solidarity Movement, I wasn’t looking forward to it. It’s great to be surprised.

In March 2002 he was approached by director Sansour to spend the Easter in the West Bank. There he meets people who pack their bags and are determined to stand in the way of the guns , tanks and bulldozers of the world’s fourth largest army. We go behind the news bulletins. At first, you think these people are mad, but known as the Internationals, their presence can cause disruption when they stay in parts of Palestine under attack by the Israeli army. While the world might ignore the Palestinians, it won’t ignore those from Europe or the US injured or killed by the army.

Determined to remain non violent, the ISM at first seems foolish. The turning point, for Hardy (as far as I could see), was when soldiers start shooting the ground in front of a tank obstructed by “Internationals”. It is a scary moment. The ricochet hits some of them and Hardy, reticent and more than slightly scared, is suddenly angry and finds that he has joined the others in obstructing the tank.

By the end of this great documentary, you won’t be surprised to discover that Hardy goes back and will be cheering him on.

The Daily Telegraph
18 July 2003

Review by Sukhdev Sandhu



Jeremy Hardy v The Israeli Army

Nick Nolte may be a pretty fearsome enemy to have breathing down your face, but he's as nothing compared to the Israeli army that Jeremy Hardy takes on in Leila Sansour's striking new documentary, Jeremy Hardy Versus the Israeli Army. The comedian and broadcaster, long renowned as one of the most politically engaged performers on a comedy circuit that has long shed its aspirations to being "alternative" or oppositional, fronts a film about the work of the International Solidarity Movement in campaigning against the occupation of the West Bank.

Yet he's sceptical at first and believes that the protesters are "living out some vainglorious fantasy about their own lives". Soon, though, he sees maternity hospitals that have been shelled, live gun-rounds fired towards his friends, huge swathes of Bethlehem cordoned off or bombed. He loses his voice, but comes to value the bravery he sees not only among the protesters but also among the Palestinians whose daily lives have been deformed for decades. In contrast to Elia Suleiman's Divine Intervention last year, which used irony and surrealism to convey the strangeness of the West Bank, Hardy, an outsider, talks of his shock and anger.

The film, some of it shot illegally, has an urgent, guerrilla feel to it. It resembles a work-in-progress, just like the ISM campaign itself. Self-funded and now widely released despite being passed over by TV schedulers, it's an expression of the same idealism it heralds in those people, young and old, students and businessmen, Israelis and non-Israelis, who risk their lives to stand up for what they believe in.

Dedicated to the young peace campaigner Rachel Corrie, who was killed earlier this year, Sansour's film will appeal to all Michael Moore fans, but it also has considerable break-out potential. It's an urgent, revelatory work, an utterly compelling paean to the idea of freedom itself.