MIT Lecture Series Committee

November 20, 2013

Rated PG-13
101 minutes

view trailer

format: bluray

The Gatekeepers (2012)

Admission is free! Sponsored by the Hillel club, MISTI Israel, and the Undergraduate Association. There will be a short talk after the film.

Charged with overseeing Israel's war on terror -- both Palestinian and Jewish -- the head of the Shin Bet, Israel's secret service is present at the crossroad of every decision made. For the first time ever six former heads of the agency agreed to share their insights and reflect publicly on their actions and decisions. The Gatekeepers offers an exclusive account of the sum of their success and failures. It validates the reasons that each man individually and the six as a group came to reconsider their hard-line positions and advocate a conciliatory approach toward their enemies based on a two-state solution. [www.sonyclassics.com]

The Gatekeepers received a 2013 Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Feature, and is the winner of multiple awards including Most Valuable Documentary of the Year at the 2013 Cinema for Peace awards, and Best Documentary at the 2013 Awards of the Israeli Film Academy.

The level of candor here may not satisfy hard-liners of either stripe, but it can help viewers begin to formulate new questions about the philosophical, strategic and moral challenges of conflict, in particular "wars on terror."
      -- Lisa Kennedy, Denver Post. Read this review.