A documentary featuring interviews with all surviving former heads of Shin Bet, the Israeli security agency whose activities and membership are closely held state secrets.A documentary featuring interviews with all surviving former heads of Shin Bet, the Israeli security agency whose activities and membership are closely held state secrets.A documentary featuring interviews with all surviving former heads of Shin Bet, the Israeli security agency whose activities and membership are closely held state secrets.
- Nominated for 1 Oscar
- 7 wins & 12 nominations total
Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaIn an interview at a film festival Dror Moreh indicated that he would like a 5-part TV series in order to show the rest of the footage.
- GoofsIn the opening scene, the coordinates on satellite or UAV video feed are either in the East Pacific or the West Pacific depending on whether one takes the longitude to be East or West respectively.
- Quotes
Avraham Shalom: Gradually there was an increase... To put it cynically, luckily for us, terrorism increased. Why do I say that? Because now we had work and we stopped dealing with the Palestinian state. Understood? As soon as we stopped dealing with the Palestinian state and started dealing with terrorism, terror became more sophisticated. So did we. Suddenly we had a lot of work in Gaza and the West Bank, and overseas, too, so we forgot about the Palestinian issue.
- ConnectionsFeatured in Maltin on Movies: Warm Bodies (2013)
There is a lot of good and interesting information that is presented in this film, but of course, not all history and the whole complexity of the conflict could have been brought on screen in a documentary that lasts about 90 minutes. Lacking facts will certainly expose the film to critics from all directions, but these critics would be to some extent unfair. In fact for the Israeli audiences there is nothing completely new here, investigative reporting in the Israeli press, TV documentary movies, and books written by political experts and historians have exposed sometimes in much more details different aspects of the stories presented in this film. What is new and different is the candid manner the makers of the movie succeed to make the six different personalities who successively lead the service talk about the events that took place in the last 45 years, their meaning, their implications. Attentive spectators who also know the differences between the views and positions of the six leaders will perceive also the differences between their opinions and their approaches into presenting the facts, but overall a fascinating perspective is built by getting together their testimonies and the history of the area in the period between the Six Days War and today, the initial euphoria, the lost opportunities, the achievements and the mistakes in the fight against terror, the moral dilemmas and the price of the occupation, the human risks and morality of lack of morality of some of the methods – all come together in a perspective which is amplified by the coherent message delivered by each one of the speakers. If you search for information in this film you will not get the whole picture, and I am quite sure that the film will be much better understood from this point of view by Israelis than by audiences abroad. If you look for the historic trends and for indications about things to come, it's mandatory viewing, and it does not look like good news, but rather like a very strong warning signal from people who were in the middle of the policy making and security actions of Israel.
I believe that this film should be seen by as many people as possible and debated in Israel. Best would be probably a screening on prime time TV, but I am not optimistic about this happening soon as prime time TV in Israel seems to be almost fully booked by (i)reality shows. At least, by now The Gatekeepers is distributed commercially and the audiences seem to be interested. However, the more echoes may come from abroad, especially as the film is a candidate for the Oscar in the documentary category, certainly if it also wins the award. The editing of the film is smart, the combination between historical footage and computerized effects puts even more life into the illustrations, and the permanent images of the big screens as a symbol of the technology used to permanently supervise the territories is haunting. I have seen however much more sophisticated technical means put at work in documentaries. 'The Gatekeepers' is eventually a talking heads movie and is important because of the stories that the talking heads tell and the message that they deliver.
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Details
Box office
- Gross US & Canada
- $2,415,727
- Opening weekend US & Canada
- $61,552
- Feb 3, 2013
- Gross worldwide
- $2,573,616
- Runtime1 hour 41 minutes
- Color
- Sound mix
- Aspect ratio
- 1.85 : 1
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