The contemporary world cinema does its best to be up-to-date as regards military conflicts. Imaging/representation of war or nostalgia for the war past make a perfect starting point for creating films full of pathos and patriotism, which very often become a part of strategy for historical policy. A female figure in this type of visualisations usually fulfils a role of a passive victim who is exposed to danger and simply needs to be rescued.

The virtually ceaseless Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, like any other contemporary armed conflicts, generates new types of experiences, changes traditional societies and inverts social roles. Increasingly often, cinema as a medium fulfils the un-taboo role, visualising individual micro-stories that otherwise would not have had any chance to appear in a wider discourse.

My lecture aims above all at tracing changes in imaging figures of women in Israel and Palestine. The war-related sexual violence, bombings or very widely understood female perpetration continue to be a rather controversial topic. How does the contemporary cinema tackle these kinds of experiences? Does it avoid getting stuck into stereotypes and clichés characteristic for the mainstream trend ? Does the visualisation of suffering of women from that region of the world in the contemporary cinema inscribe into a wider context of the female or even feminist cinema?

Joanna Ostrowska