Wall

The interviews Bitton conducts, almost all with Arabs and Jews who share her despair, are less meaningful than what she captures in silence: the sight of farmers separated from their farmland, everyday people thwarted in their dailiness, and children playing next to what looks like prison walls.

A deeply personal and unexpectedly poetic film.

The French filmmaker Simone Bitton takes a measured look at the barrier in her documentary Wall, a film that considers hard-core political realities alongside agonizing personal truths.

Bitton is Frederick Wiseman-obsessive about the practical details that make this horrific arrangement work, but she's also an unabashed polemicist.

Helmer -- an Arab Jew who has lived on both sides of Jerusalem and is comfortable speaking idiomatic Arabic and Hebrew -- is particularly well qualified to tackle her subject.

While all this might have made for a potent short subject, the abstract visual monotony begins to wear thin shortly into the 98-minute running time.

Tedious left-wing documentary.