Activists in Gaza try to stop a 65-ton bulldozer like the one that crushed Rachel Corrie
Review from the Berlin International Film Festival
By Ray Bennett
BERLIN — The drive to keep alive the name of a young American woman who died beneath a U.S.-made bulldozer driven by an Israeli soldier in Palestine continues in Simone Bitton’s sober documentary “Rachel.”
The idealistic Rachel Corrie was one of a team of activists from the U.S. and the U.K. who lived with Palestinian families in the most dangerous areas of the Gaza Strip in 2003 in an attempt to ameliorate the actions of the Israeli military demolishing homes close to the exclusion wall it had erected there.
She was the subject of “My Name is Rachel Corrie,” a very moving 2005 play put together by actor Alan Rickman and journalist Katherine Viner. Starring Megan Dodds, it played at the Royal Court and then in London’s West End before getting a New York run in 2006.
Read my full review in The Hollywood Reporter and my review of the play “My Name is Rachel Corrie,” which ran before it was presented in New York.