The Gatekeepers

Ends tonight, April 4. Israeli filmmaker Dror Moreh set up interviews with six men from Shin Bet, Israel’s Internal Security Service—Avraham Shalom, Yaacov Peri, Carmi Gillon, Ami Ayalon, Avi Dichter and Yuval Diskin, each of whom had done a stint as the agency’s head sometime in the last 30 years. The Oscar-nominated documentary that resulted, mostly talking heads with intermittent bits of archival footage, is a riveting, wide-ranging and unexpectedly illuminating account of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Each of the six becomes a distinctive character in his own right, and Moreh’s brilliant editing marshals their remarks into a briskly articulated essay on the miscalculations, self-inflicted wounds, and aggravated blind spots on both sides of the conflict. The Shin Bet six and the film itself are surprising in their candor and their independence from hard-line dogma. Pageant Theatre. Rated PG-13.