Educational Media Reviews Online

This film is essentially a collection of oral testimonies by residents of three distant cities on the borderland periphery of Europe that are united by one theme: these cities are divided or separated by walls. Names, social status and even locations of the interviewed residents are not provided and often intermixed, perhaps to convey a sense of objectivity and universally shared humanistic/humanitarian issues yet often the outcome is the opposite. In part, the film is valuable as an example of subtly biased media representation.

Any wall has purpose(s), and that should be way better explained in the film. Any wall has two sides yet not all sides are represented (or represented equally) in the film. For example, this Al Jazeera film shows only the Palestinian side of the Bethlehem/Jewish Jerusalem wall, and in Nicosia (Cyprus) Turkish voices are prioritized over testimonies of Greek residents.

In Belfast (Northern Ireland) priorities of the filmmaker are less clear and it might be a good exercise for students to figure out (through visual clues) what side(s) of the wall is more/less represented in the film and why.

As always, 52-minute-long TV films should be adapted for presentation in classroom by separation into shorter chapters, with clear explanation of their context -- location, date, social/ethnic/religious milieu should be provided, especially for contested topics such as the borderlands between civilizations..