Film
Bristol Palestine Film Festival 2019: The Man Who Stole Banksy
- Director
- Marco Proserpio
- Certificate
- TBA
- Running Time
- 93 mins
The 2019 Bristol Palestine Film Festival opens with the first local screening of what’s billed as “an adventure story about street art, donkeys and capitalism”.
The titular light-fingered fella is Walid ‘The Beast’ Zawahrah. Back in 2007, Bristol’s most famous street artist snuck into Palestine, where, among other things, he painted a mural of an Israeli soldier asking a donkey for its identity papers. This caused offence among some Palestinians, who reckoned Banksy was depicting them as donkeys. But for Mr. Zawahrah, a local taxi driver, the mural presented an opportunity. He promptly cut it down and flogged it on eBay. Marco Proserpio‘s film explores the ethics of the market in street art from a Palestinian perspective. It’s narrated in typically gravelly tones by Iggy Pop.
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