An exercise on “colour” in Michael Ballhaus’s class at the DFFB in West Berlin went down in the history of cinema and subversion. In retrospect, this silent miniature became the harried document of a movement of departure that was to grow criminal powers. It was shot on 18 January 1968, five years after JFK’s statement of bloc affiliation, “Ich bin ein Berliner,” just before the murder of Benno Ohnesorg, a few months before the assassination attempt on Rudi Dutschke. Director-in-training Gerd Conradt and fourteen fellow students and friends organised a relay race to the Schöneberg town hall to raise the red flag there. The final leg was run by cinematography student Holger Meins, who was to become a terrorist with the Red Army Faction and starved himself to death in Wittlich prison in 1974.

Words of the poet Mahmoud Darwish open this film: “I do not hate people, I do not assault anyone, but if I get hungry, I eat the flesh of my usurper. Beware, beware of my hunger, and of my anger.” This is followed by the title, then the subtitle: “An Israeli reports.” Her name is Edna Politi; she was born in Lebanon, emigrated to Israel and was accepted into the German Film and Television Academy in West Berlin in 1971. Politi’s student film is explanatory: Where does the Palestinian rage, the desperation come from? Soberly and carefully, she compiles everyday observations, facts and figures to draw attention to the mechanisms of the economic and political disenfranchisement of the Palestinian people. Her aim is to convince, not persuade.