Juliette Binoche dips into Mideast with Gaza film

By Ari Rabinovitch

TEL AVIV (Reuters) - After portraying headstrong women caught up in the European battlefields of World War Two and the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia, Juliette Binoche has thrown herself into the Middle East conflict.

The Oscar-winning actress flew to Tel Aviv this week to appear in the first dramatic film to explore Israel's 2005 withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, where, along with the West Bank, Palestinians have been fighting to create their own state.

In "Disengagement," the French-born Binoche plays a woman whose daughter is among some 8,000 Jewish settlers resentfully evacuated from Gaza in a whirlwind military operation.

"She is an outsider. She goes there without judgment, only recognition of the complex situation," Binoche, 42, told Reuters in a joint interview with the film's director, Amos Gitai.

Binoche described the film as an outgrowth of her curiosity about the Middle East and about Gitai, an Israeli whose politically charged projects have a large following in Europe.

Also slated to appear in "Disengagement" is Jeanne Moreau, a grande dame of French cinema.

"Over the years I've asked Amos many questions about the situation here in Israel, trying to get an inside point of view," Binoche said. "I knew he would present that in a healthy way."

Gitai's past films have included "Free Zone," which explores Jewish-Arab tensions in the Holy Land, and "Kippur," a gritty yet painterly account of the 1973 Middle East war that draws on the director's experiences as a soldier on the front line.

Gitai has made no secret of his left-leaning views -- the kind not generally shared by Israeli settlers, who are often ultranationalists and whose enclaves on occupied territory are viewed abroad as illegal.

But with the Palestinian crisis far from over and many Israelis still seething about what they see as the government's betrayal of a Jewish birthright to Gazan land, "Disengagement" is being filmed on a closed set far from the public eye.

Gitai usually spurns traditional scripts, allowing his film's plots to evolve spontaneously as the actors improvise. He hinted that, in his latest film, Binoche would provide a counterpoint to his ideas about the Gaza pullout.

"We've talked a lot about the conflicts here in Israel and I've told her what I think, but Juliette brings something of her own to the movie," he said.

Binoche first achieved international acclaim for her turn in the 1988 adaptation of "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," Milan Kundera's novel about the anti-Soviet uprising in Prague.

She won an Academy Award as best supporting actress in "The English Patient" (1996), in which she played a Canadian nurse tending to wounded Allied troops during World War Two.

Reuters/Nielsen