“Rachel,” Simone Bitton’s fascinating if uneven documentary about Rachel Corrie, the activist killed in Gaza in 2003, shares a goal with “My Name Is Rachel Corrie,” the controversial Off Broadway play from 2006. Both lionize this 23-year-old protester from Olympia, Wash., who was crushed under a mound of dirt pushed by an Israeli bulldozer clearing a Palestinian area.
Ms. Bitton’s film is not so much a portrait of Ms. Corrie, reviewing events that fed her idealism, as much as an examination of her death. Ms. Bitton, who has French and Israeli citizenship, interviews Ms. Corrie’s fellow activists from the International Solidarity Movement — Scots, an Englishman, a Chicagoan, a performance artist from Kansas City, Mo., in their teens and 20s when in Gaza — as well as her parents and professors, a doctor, members of the Israel Defense Forces and Palestinians who knew her.
No Gazan on camera speaks of Palestinian militant activity, while Israelis are twice filmed holding documents that are related to the incident against their chest like scarlet letters; Ms. Corrie’s agonized mother is in deep close-up as her father reads a letter from their daughter. Ms. Bitton’s off-screen voice is audibly sympathetic with the activists and disdainful of the Israelis, who are mindful of the international condemnation prompted by the death but stoic, resigned to the consequences of a perennial conflict.
A protester acknowledges the “extremely naïve” dimension of his actions, and Ms. Corrie, while wry in writing about “propagandizing” in her letters, also comes off as endearingly youthful, passionate and earnest. Regrettably, the film, almost devoid of music, is drastically undermined at its end by an inadvertently comic rap tribute by the Kansas City performance artist to the “American citizen with Palestinian blood.”
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