Palestine seen through a Jewish lens at festival

US FILMMAKER Julian Schnabel, a New York Jew, tells it like it is from the Palestinian point of view in Miral – as screening at the Venice film festival got into full swing yesterday.

Based on an autobiographical novel of the same name by Palestinian journalist Rula Jebreal, the French-Israeli-Italian-Indian production traces the more than four decades from the creation of Israel until the Oslo peace accords of 1993.

Like Jebreal, Miral grew up in an orphanage in East Jerusalem set up by a Jerusalem socialite from a wealthy Palestinian family who one day in 1948 came across a group of children who escaped the massacre of Deir Yassin, a nearby village, committed by radical Jewish militants.