Documentary-watching craze!

Ever since I got hold of my GoogleTV box last year, documentary consumption was high due to the accessibility and ease of consumption. Focus was mostly on financial crisis related ones, 9/11 of course, WWII, biography based movies and documentaries about US presidents, you name it. So they were mostly English. And I remember once talking to a friend of mine about where are our documentaries? That I wish there was an easy way to access all those political documentaries Aljazeera have made over the years. And that was that, didn’t do much searching then.

More recently however, after I went to the opening of the Israeli Apartheid Week held in Amman last month, I’ve been on a AlJazeerah documentary consumption craze after I found a very well done documentary about Wadi Araba accord. I started picking one documentary after the other!

Most documentaries were well done, balanced with a lot of point of views expressed from different parties. Thinking that Aljazeera should do much less news reporting and focus on documentaries and in depth reports!

It has been an emotional roller coaster, from sadness to outrage to total disbelief at times. The details. Oh how important are the details in attempting to come up with a renewed personal discourse, let alone a collective one.

The perspective on having watched this collection over a two week period is of course a very complex view spanning several nations and people. Jordan, Palestine, Egypt and Lebanon.

Several ideas came to my mind, the geek in me wants to create a timeline for the  region with major events and when they took place so you see what was happening in the next at the same time. Another idea is to combine that with personal accounts of ordinary people, video and audio stories. One is to make one about my family and interview all my aunts and uncles over their personal accounts since 1948 till dates, their political views and which parties thy supported and at what capacity, what changed….etc.

Haven’t decided on any yet, but any support is very welcome 🙂

In case anyone has an obsessive addictive personality like mine and would like to watch any of these, here is a log of all those documentaries I’ve watched (so far!)

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Razan Khatib

Razan Khatib

Playing at the intersection of culture, technology, and values. Trying to structure my thoughts and share experiences, learnings, and insights. Co-founder of @spring_apps
Amman, Jordan