Yaakov Peri, Shin Bet head 1988-96
Six smart, tough guys, tightly framed and talking to the camera: Israeli filmmaker Dror Moreh’s compelling Oscar-nominated doc “The Gatekeepers” gives the voice of experience a human face.
Moreh’s subjects are all former heads of Shin Bet, Israel’s anti-terrorist internal security agency. Given that they successively ran the Shin Bet from 1980 to 2011, these men are steeped in intelligence. They know where the bodies are buried and there’s a practiced pragmatism in the way that they handle Moreh’s often blunt, sometimes Talmudic questions. “With terrorism there are no morals,” one tells him. Indeed, the interviews are punctuated with harrowing footage of suicide-bombed buses, decimated Gaza neighborhoods and violent demonstrations—both Palestinian and Israeli.
Image: Sony Classics Pictures
