Film Review: A Steady Lens and a Dangerous Weapon

Briarpatch Magazine

By Ali Mustafa

5 Broken Cameras
Directed by Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi

As soon as residents of the Israeli-occupied West Bank village of Bil’in learned of plans to build a wall on their land to make way for a Jewish-only settlement in 2005, non-violent demonstrations erupted. During the same year, Emad Burnat, a local villager, purchased his first video camera to record the birth of his youngest son, Gibreel. From the beginning of the film 5 Broken Cameras, co-directed by Burnat and Israeli filmmaker Guy Davidi, these two events are inextricably entangled.

G20 Profile: Independent Journalist, Daniel Adam MacIsaac

Toronto Media Co-op



photo credit: Ali Mustafa

By Ali Mustafa



“Sunday, June 27 is a day that I will never forget,” says Adam MacIsaac, an independent journalist and environmental activist from Prince Edward Island who came to Toronto to cover the G20 Summit for the Canadian Youth Climate Coalition.

He arrived at the G20 Alternative Media Centre (AMC) at some point between 9:30 – 10:00 PM. Visibly shaken, clothes in tatters, and soaking wet from the pouring rain outside, he begins to recount in detail what happened to him.

His ordeal is finally over, but his story is only beginning. Like several of his AMC colleagues, MacIsaac came to Toronto to cover the story of the G20 Summit and, unwittingly, became a part of the story instead.

Earlier that day, at approximately noon, MacIsaac was biking towards the G20 detention centre where he planned to record video footage of a ‘jail solidarity’ rally. Between the intersection of Bloor Street West and St. Thomas Street, MacIsaac witnessed police conducting illegal searches on a group of individuals.

He stopped, pulled out his video camera, and began to document the incident.

“I kept safe space for both the police and myself. I was then asked to back up. I had shown my pass [Alternative Media Centre pass] to show that I was media and not just a nosy person with a video camera. They then ripped my pass away and had also ripped my UN badge holder away from me, and said that this is not a legitimate media pass,” MacIsaac said.

Critical Letter + My Response

Upon the publication of my interview with Carlos Latuff in the March/April issue of the YU Free Press (accompanied with these two cartoons by him shown above), thousands of copies of the campus newspaper were systematically thrown in the garbage; its racks were vandalized, some even destroyed beyond repair; and several angry letters were sent via email denouncing Latuff, myself, and by extension the YUFP as 'anti-Semitic'. Below is one such letter that more or less encapsulates the general sentiment of the approximately dozen emails that were received, along with a personal response from myself - both of which I am sharing here in the interests of critical reflection and debate: