Hasbara

A state's official account of its conflict, delivered by the work as if it were nobody's account at all. The army is the protagonist's employer and the camera's home; its violence is response, the other side's is origin; the occupied appear as a security problem rather than a people, and the words are the ministry's words - terror, defense, restraint - spoken by characters the story trusts. Named for the Israeli practice, because that is where the template was perfected and where the catalogue keeps finding it, but the move is any government's: it is propaganda that works by being mistaken for a setting. The tell is a conflict with one side's grief on screen and the other side's casualties in a line of dialogue.

2 titles carry this label · chronological