The Dust Channel (2016)

	Also Known As: -
	Year of first release: 2016
	Director: Roee Rosen
	Actors: -
	Country: IL
	Genre: Documentary
	Conditions of visioning: 17.09.2017, Palais Bellevue, documenta14, video
Synopsis: It is an operetta with a Russian libretto set in the domestic environment of a bourgeois Israeli family, whose fear of dirt, dust, or any alien presence in their home takes the shape of a perverted devotion to home-cleaning appliances. Rosen associates dust figuratively with sand. The desert obliquely points to specific and current forms of xenophobia. The detention center where political refugees are held long-term and unrecognized by the state is in the Israeli desert and named Holot—the Hebrew word for sand.
Review: The first half of the 23-minutes movie is a long advertisement for Dyson robotic vacuum cleaner in the house of an Israeli family. Sometimes funny and common like many other video ads. The second half makes a lot of parallels between the sand from the desert, the migrants arriving in Israel, and the dust from which the family wants to get rid of. The visual forms of this second part is propaganda as what we all know from CNN/Fox news during the Irak and Afghanistan wars, and that have been broadcast everywhere in the world as world truth. Roee Rosen plays with the same style as a kind of propaganda by and with Benjamin Netanyahu. The movie has been presented at the modern art exhibition in Kassel, Germany, documenta14. The parallel is expected to shock. It did not shock me, but maybe it is because I did not like the styles that have been used.
Rating: 5 /10