Delicate French actress Juliet Binoche has immersed herself in one of Israel's toughest, loudest and most wrenching events for her part in a film about the evacuation of the Gaza Strip and destruction of the 21 Jewish settlements there, shooting an especially violent scene on Thursday.

The movie, called Disengagement, the official Israeli term for the 2005 pullout, casts Binoche as a French woman who tries to find her estranged daughter in Gaza, just as the Israeli government was forcibly removing the settlers.

Binoche, known more for her elegance and sensitivity than roles involving riots and gunfire, said that filming in Israel and watching documentaries helped her to connect emotionally with her role.

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"I understand now more the feeling that people went through," she said.
Though his movie comes less than two years after the pullout, which badly split Israeli society and generated scenes of screaming settlers being dragged out of their houses by tearful soldiers, Israeli director Amos Gitai said it was not too early to examine it through his film.

"We are living in a contemporary, profound story," Gitai said. "Cinema can also expose us to different viewpoints and get us away from caricatures and stereotypes."

In a scene shot on Thursday, Gitai used one long camera shot to depict Binoche dodging in and out of a crush of extras playing Palestinians, police and settlers as a backhoe demolished the red-tiled roof of a house.

Gitai said he got the idea to do the movie when his son, who was serving in the Israel Defense Forces at the time, called him and told him to come and watch the pullout.

"I disagree with the settlers politically, but it's still very hard to watch someone lose the place they grew up in," Gitai said.

Nitzan, the site that Amos spent months locating, is the temporary home of over 480 settler families removed from Gaza in 2005. Gitai said he tried to start a dialogue with the displaced settlers, but it failed because they wanted to impose their opinions on him.

"I will not have my opinions censored," Gitai said.

Binoche said that the movie is not taking sides on the issue, merely asking questions about what happened. In the movie, she plays a foreigner who accidentally ends up in the middle of the controversy and is forced to look at it objectively.

In real life, Binoche, who won an Oscar in 1997 for her told in The English Patient, said that her third trip to Israel continues to help her understand the delicate political situation.

"Even though I understand that Israel had to do what it did to work toward peace, it's overwhelming to me. It gets to me, Binoche said.
The crew filmed for two weeks in France, over 10 days in Israel and will finish up in Germany," said Richard Lormand, unit publicist. "None of the movie was filmed in Gaza because the Israeli government demolished all the buildings in the former settlements after the evacuation," he
said.

Another aspect of the film examines the difference between Europeans' perspective of the Middle East and views of the local residents.

Binoche said "it's important to get different points of view. If you only see one side of the story, you lose your humanity, she said.