Gutmensch unwilling.

A Palestinian man leaves the bodies of his dead son's donation - to patients in Israel, irrespective of their religion. A feel-good story? No way: The documentary "The Heart of Jenin" is not easy.

 

Ahmed Khatib was twelve years old when he was shot. The boy from the autonomous Palestinian town of Jenin was with a machine gun on the plastic, which looked so real that it was Israeli soldiers held for a terrorist. A terrible mistake, bitter and tragic, just as it can happen in a permanent state of war.

Ahmed's father Ismael, the bodies of his son to donate. Heart, kidney, liver and lungs, in six patients in Israel, the case in late 2005 for a large media interest ensured. A baby has not survived the transplant, two of the recipients remained anonymous - the other three children Ismael Khatib with a film crew visited: the Bedouin's son Mohammed, the small Samah, which belongs to the Druze, and Menuha from an Orthodox Jewish family in Jerusalem.

On this Thursday, the resulting documentary "The Heart of Jenin" to the directors from Israel, Lior Geller and Marcus Vetter from Germany to the cinema, and most spectators are expected to have a moving feel-good story expect the story of a noble man of his grief back in place in order to do something good, irrespective of political and religious boundaries.

And partly it is so simple but it makes the film not. The first scenes are anything but heart warming: There are pictures of the dead Ahmed, from the morgue of the Israeli hospital in an ambulance and brought to his parents in the West Bank will be driven. They rallied in addition to the crying family immediately a crowd of people around the corpse, it shall wind up in a Palestinian flag and carries it through the city. "Raise high the martyrs," calls the angry mob. And: "Each death is avenged by 100".

Even the father, at the center of the film, is not just a sacred gentleman. It was an act of humanity was, he says, "with politics has nothing to do". But later he says, his humanity is to be understood as resistance. "Do you think it has fallen to the Israelis what I have done?" He says.

He calls himself a former resistance fighter, says that he and Molotov cocktails and stones thrown in jail several times landed. Before the donation, he has to a chief of the Al-Aqsa Brigades, demanded whether he really should make, including the mufti of Jenin had his approval.

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Ismael Khatib believes in no reconciliation, just as the devout Jew Jakoov Levinson, the daughter of Ahmed got a kidney. He is eternally grateful that his child should live, but for Palestinians it will remain a threat. "Those crazy Arabs are trying constantly kill us," he says into the camera, and the meeting of the two men is so subliminally unentspannt and hostile that no one can take seriously, the two camps could ever find each other.

There are no heroes in "The Heart of Jenin, just people trying to get the right to do so. Whether this is cause for hope for peace there can be only one viewer to interpret for themselves. That makes this film worth seeing.