Part of First Look 2020
Sunday, March 15, 2020, 3:30 p.m.
Museum of the Moving Image - Redstone Theater

Please note: This event has been canceled. Click here for more information.

With Ra'anan Alexandrowicz in person

Dir. Ra'anan Alexandrowicz. United States, Israel. 2020, 73 mins. DCP. What are we actually seeing when we look at images? To what degree do we believe our eyes, and what extra-sensorial factors define our doubts and investments in what is visible? Minimalist in approach yet far-reaching in its application and consequence, The Viewing Booth triangulates an on-screen director, an on-screen viewer, and the viewer in the audience, all reckoning with disputed images. In a lab-like editing suite, director Ra'anan Alexandrowicz invites a series of viewers to watch and comment upon videos portraying life in the occupied West Bank—some generated by Palestinian citizens, others by the Israeli government—before fixing on Maya, a young Jewish American woman whose responses prove compelling, thoughtful, varied, and disconcerting enough to warrant a repeat visit. Throughout, Alexandrowicz walks a razor-thin line of instigation and openness to his own process, allowing viewers of The Viewing Booth to wrestle and identify with the issues that surface, echoing with a worldwide media crisis in which measures of truth have been utterly destabilized. New York premiere