Abstract
The world of cinema treats 'justice' in a nuanced way. If the film depicts conflict zones, justice sometimes becomes the kernel of the chronicle. Lemon Tree (2008) and Jîn (2013) ' from Israel and Turkey are two of the films which convey post-positivist connotations of justice. Lemon Tree is an Israeli film directed by Eran Riklis. This apparently apolitical film shows the legal efforts of a Palestinian widow to stop the Israeli Defense Minister, her neighbor, from destroying the lemon trees in her family farm. The exquisite eco-feminist nuance has made the movie a richly layered parable. On the other hand, Turkish movie Jîn by Reha Erdem is an ecological tale using the Turkish-Kurdish conflict as the metaphor for the dystopian human world demolishing the floral and faunal symphony. The film is characterized by the storytelling of fairy tales. Jîn feels like a modern-day version of 'Little Red Riding Hood'. Neither poetic nor prosaic, justice is at best 'hung' in these two movies. The absence of juridical justice has been tried to be repaid by arboreal righteousness. However, both the women and the environment are endangered in the conflict zones where justice has been reduced to a mere mirage. The trees, the animals, the birds, the insects along with the women silently wait for justice. They are agonized by the culture of hatred and war-mongering machismo. Still they exude the zeal to defy, the zeal to ask for justice, may be restorative or reparative but never retributive.
Author Information
Shankhamala Ray, Jadavpur University, India
Paper Information
Conference: ACAH2016
Stream: Humanities - Media, Film Studies, Theatre, Communication
This paper is part of the ACAH2016 Conference Proceedings (View)
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