PUBLIC MARKS with tag lang:en

One sense of fear, two armies, and three rows of electrical fences separate Israel and the Gaza Strip. For the past 10 years, it has been difficult for residents of these two places to ever imagine meeting one another in person. Now, thanks to a new documentary project produced by French/German television station Arte TV and a handful of Israeli and Palestinian production teams, residents of the besieged Israeli city of Sderot and the besieged Gaza Strip are able to see something they haven't seen in a decade: each other.

A German television studio has produced a series of two minute videos from Gaza and Sderot, an Israeli city neighboring Gaza. The clips reveal what the news cameras do not: snapshots of daily life. It's an amazing behind the scenes look at the individuals behind the labels of "Israeli" or "Palestinian."

For now that data is not being used to change overall search results, she said. But in the future it’s likely Google will use the data to at least make obvious changes. An example is if “thousands of people” were to knock a search result off a search page, they’d be likely to make a change.

what a challenging concept. and extra interesting, as Sderot is a city that also appears in the 2028 story. now it suddenly is there, just a click away.

I take from this that Gaza’s population doesn’t fear genocide, however insufferable the situation. I really resent Abunimah persisting with this.

You are dead.

Another must-see is the Gaza/Sderot video documentary project set up by ARTE (French-German cultural TV station), which is currently showing 60 two-minute videos shot in Gaza and Sderot. The videos are organised by day and shown in pairs - Gaza on one side of your screen and Sderot from the same time on the other - so you get a sense of the two populations as contemporaries as well as neighbours.

Another must-see is the Gaza/Sderot video documentary project set up by ARTE (French-German cultural TV station), which is currently showing 60 two-minute videos shot in Gaza and Sderot. The videos are organised by day and shown in pairs - Gaza on one side of your screen and Sderot from the same time on the other - so you get a sense of the two populations as contemporaries as well as neighbours.

'Gaza Sderot' (2008), subtitled 'Life in spite of everything', is an ambitious web doc portraying the daily life of twelve people in Gaza (Palestine) and Sderot (Israel), from October 26 to two days ago. The state of the art website, by Upian, let's you browse scenes by time, place, people and topics -- all the while visually emphasizing the border cutting through the two places.

Contrary to the suicide bombers and sniper themed news reports we are so-often bombarded with on news channels, Gaza Sderot, an online documentary, profiles two war-ravaged Israel/Palestinian border towns, Sderot (Israel) and Gaza (Palestine), with twelve featured characters going about their daily lives.

Alexandre Brachet is a Paris-based e-producer and director of experimental, cross-media production studio Upian. A luminary in the world multi-platform documentaries, he merges cutting-edge technology and traditional techniques to break new ground in made-for-broadband story-telling. We managed to corner him after an inspirational presentation at the very first edition of the International Documentary Film Festival's (IDFA) new Doclab program, for a vin rouge-infused chat about two of his latest projects: the much loved (and aforementioned) rich-media micro-doc series Gaza/Sderot (Life In Spite of Everything), and Thanatorama, an interactive Webdoc about what happens after you die.

"Gaza/Sderot: Life in Spite of Everything" is a brand new web-only multimedia documentary of life in Palestine. http://gaza-sderot.arte.tv/

This series of online micro-docs broadcast daily from two war-ravaged Israel-Palestine border towns, should snuff out any lingering doubters of the Webdoc genre. The humour, resourcefulness, and resigned acceptance with which the twelve featured characters go about their daily lives provide a poignant contrast to the ‘suicide bombers vs snipers’ theme favoured by news reporters. An immediate, non-linear documentary experience which invites public discussion (case in point: the empassioned discussion on the related Facebook group), this visually striking project will no doubt open up the age-old conflict to curious, new audiences.

This video showcases a Hackathon project that visualizes all the data Facebook receives.

In film and video production, split screen is the visible division of the screen, traditionally in half, but also in several simultaneous images, rupturing the illusion that the screen's frame is a seamless view of reality, similar to that of the human eye. Until the arrival of digital technology in the early 1990s, this was accomplished by using an optical printer to combine two or more actions filmed separately by copying them onto the same negative, called the composite.

A 19-year-old man has committed suicide live on the internet encouraged by others who were watching, according to reports.

The teenager, named as Abraham K Biggs, from Broward County, Florida, took an overdose of pills while broadcasting himself on Justin.tv, a live video streaming website.

The 19-year-old lay on his bed and only after several hours of no movement did others begin to take him seriously. With the video still running, forum members managed to contact the local police who eventually broke down the door, found the body and switched off the camera. Up to 1,500 people were viewing the feed, according to one report.

GAZA-SDEROT: Amazing web documentary, 2 minutes short films everyday, on the real life in these two close, but at the same time so far, cities of Palestine and Occupied Territories.

If you are a peace seeker, these videos are simply a must. If peace isn’t part of your vocabulary, please step out of this blog. PEACE, SHALOM, SALAAM!

Gaza Sderot - Life in Spite of Everything (Arte.tv 2008)