Akashma Online News

by Marivel Guzman

Marjorie Wright, American writer and producer winner of the 2009 Armin T. Wegner Award

Marjorie Wright is an American filmmaker of conscience concerned with human rights. In 2008 wrote and Co-directed with Lucy Martens, “Voices From Inside, Israelis Speak,” a film that weaves historic footage with modern-day views of Palestine: its partition walls, “apartheid roads,” demolished homes and the Israeli soldiers sent to “protect” Israel, says, The San Francisco Reporter.

In 2011 Wright was part of a group of 267  artists and supporters of the arts—including dozens of prominent playwrights, actors, directors, filmmakers, producers and theater professors from the U.S., New Zealand, Israel, England and other countries—have signed a public letter to Israeli authorities decrying the Israeli military’s attacks on The Freedom Theatre in Jenin, a northern city in the West Bank, Palestine, which was founded by Juliano Mer-Khamis, who was assassinated on  4 April 2011 in  Jenin.

Voices From Inside, Israelis Speak is a documentary film tracing an Israeli evolution of consciousness from early Zionism, a holocaust perspective, and seeds of militaristic nationalism to a positive modern perspective of conscience, honesty, and reconciliation: the real path to lasting peace.
The 16 peace activists interviewed for the film say citizens of Israel need to wake up to the country’s reality, particularly parents who send their sons and daughters to the army in which, “blinded by power,” they commit unspeakable acts.

Those Jews who speak out against human-rights abuses in Israel and Palestine increasingly face their own “ominous loss of rights,” Wright says. “There have been arrests, confiscation of computers, threats of huge fines and imprisonment.” Recent interviews with American Jewish academics, Wright says, point to the rise of what they call “fascist elements inside Israeli society and the erosion of rights even for Jewish citizens.”

The film was awarded  Arpa’s Armin T. Wegner in 2009, which each year is awards a motion picture that contributes to the fight for social conscience and human rights, “Voices from Inside: Israelis Speak.” “This feature length documentary film is based on the stories of 16 Jewish Israeli voices of conscience, each representing a different facet of the peace movement inside Israel,” says Zaven Khachaturian, Arpa Film Festival Curator who invited the film to the festival.

On 2013,  said of the film ” Voices Across the Divide,  that millions of dollars are spent on campus groups and in the media, aggressively promoting an Israel-right-or-wrong political stand and actively attacking students, professors, writers, and performers who exhibit sympathy or interest in “the other side.” This muzzling of the dialogue is a major threat to our fundamental principles of free speech and tolerance and thus to our basic democratic values. It is also deeply corruptive to our foreign policy and our ability to understand how others see us. Voices Across the Divide follows Alice Rothchild’s personal journey as she begins to understand the Palestinian narrative, while exploring the Palestinian experience of loss, occupation, statelessness, and immigration to the US, exploring voices for a just peace in the region.” Written by Alice Rothchild

Voices From Inside

Voices From Inside, Israelis Speak Part 2