An Israeli documentary film won the best foreign documentary category in the prestigious Sundance Film Festival on Saturday, hardly a week after an Israeli feature film was named as an Academy Award nominee.
The film, “The Law in These Parts” (Shilton Ha Chok), was directed by Israeli Ra’anan Alexandrowicz, and is comprised of a series of interviews with former Israel Defense Forces legal officials in charge of the army’s judicial system in the occupied West Bank. Speaking of his win of the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize in Documentary, Alexandrowicz said that “The Law in These Parts” was “the hardest film I’ve made,” thanking Sundance’s documentary program.

The poster of the Israeli film “The Law in These Parts”

“This is an amazing moment for me as a filmmaker, but it’s a film about a painful and unresolved subject. What you find out in the film, and in other films in this festival, is that upholding law doesn’t always lead to justice. It can even be used as a tool against certain segments of society. We have to oppose them, and if necessary we have to break them,” Alexandrowicz said.