Like Neil Sedaka's comeback curtain raiser's upstaging the main-act Carpenters, director/co-writer/editor/producer Annemarie Jacir's master's thesis film, sixteen-and-a-half-minute-long like twenty impossibles, is a better total package than Gus Van Sant's more commercial feature Elephant at eighty-one minutes. (These films were shown together at the   screening I attended.) The former, New York-based, Saudi-raised Palestianian's neo-cinéma vérité is as close to documentary as re-creation comes, mixing jerky handheld camera and abrupt arbitrary cuts, off-screen voices, occasional barely audible sound, blank spaces and casual non-actor actors.

In this unadorned tale against a barren landscape, a film crew is held at an unexpected rural control after trying to circumvent a closed down urban checkpoint, and Mideast madness ensues. In Hebrew, soldiers address an actor (Ismail Dabbagh) who does not understand that language; a female Palestinian director (Reem Abu-Sbaih) lives in Miami, birthplace of one the soldiers, so they converse in English; their filming permit is for Area A, but this is B, and, anyway, a Palestinian soundman's (Ashraf Abu Moch) Israeli ID does not allow for entry to this West Bank, resulting in a two-thousand shekel fine; actors once used to traveling easily now can barely move about.

Occupying troops "do what they want," shrugs Mohammed, and as remaining crew members leave to seek aid, actor and technician must be left behind to face beatings and likely be shot to death. But that eventuality is not spelled out, for implication and imagination are stronger advocates than visual or aural certainty. Compared in some quarters to Pontecorvo's also pseudo-documentary The Battle of Algiers, this present piece is obviously more compact and yet, in its necessary absence of character development and visual brutality, equally devastating in condemnation.

The short drew applause and bravos but some boos, too, and a shouted "Let them show a suicide bombing!" Even here in New York, such nay-saying is wide of the mark. like twenty impossibles is not pro-Palestinian or anti-something-else but, rather, a sane depiction of insanity, the essential non-coherence of strife, fear, bravery and blood.

(Not rated by MPAA.)