Mel Gibson's film is not being released in the Holy Land, but has an eager audience. Nuala Haughey finds some clandestine screenings.
Behind a heavy curtain in a darkened room in a hotel in Arab East Jerusalem, a small audience has gathered nightly during Easter week for surreptitious screenings of the controversial movie The Passion of the Christ.
Mel Gibson's crucifixion epic has not been released in the Holy Land where the biblical events it portrays are commemorated this weekend, so a healthy underground trade in pirated DVDs and videos has sprung up to satisfy local demand. Normally, mainstream American films arrive in Israeli cinemas within a month or two of being released in the US, with distribution deals struck well in advance. However, amid allegations from some Jewish groups that the film is anti-Semitic - demonising Jews as pressuring the Romans into crucifying Jesus - no Israeli distributor has sought permission to market this particular blockbuster here.
The local agent for the film's international distributor, Icon Entertainment, says it passed on its option to show the film, but declines to specify its reasons other than to say the movie is "sensitive".
Which, of course, has piqued the interest of the Holy Land's Christians, foreigners and Palestinians alike, who can pick up bootleg copies of the film for 30 shekels (€6) in Arab East Jerusalem and the Muslim quarter of the Old City.
Emerging from a free screening in the East Jerusalem hotel earlier this week, Old City resident Alice Bulos (67) says the film seems faithful to the Bible, but the graphic scenes of Jesus's bloody torture are just too much.
"It goes into the heart," says Bulos, a Syrian Orthodox Christian. "My sister saw it and spent the second half of the film crying. Among the people I know, it seems that especially at Easter it's having quite an impact on their faith, but not in an anti-Jewish way."
The audience of about 20 people on this night are mostly non-Palestinian and include several Catholic nuns. The viewers shift uncomfortably in their straight-back dining chairs as they watch Jesus being flailed and crucified, some quietly shedding tears.
Sister Carmenza, a Dominican nun from Colombia based in Jerusalem agrees that the film is very violent, "very tough and hard. All the way through all you see is beating and suffering, and in the faces of the people there is so much hatred. Where is the message of love?" asks the diminutive nun who is attending the illicit viewing with two fellow sisters from a nearby convent.
The hotel manger, himself a Christian, says he had the pirated copy couriered here from a friend in New York after receiving inquiries from local Christian clergy about whether the film was available. Worried that his clandestine nightly screenings might come to the attention of the Israeli authorities, he does not want the hotel to be named.
Callers seeking to reserve a place for the free viewing in his hotel are asked to provide their name and phone number, and a return call is promptly made to verify the booking.
"People are usually quite subdued after the movie," he says. "We are getting all types of audiences. Mostly Christians, some foreigners, some locals, some Muslim as well. Americans, Swedes, Bible study groups, students, teachers. We don't want to make any money on it. It's because nobody else is showing it. We got it for the churches."
Christians are a tiny minority in both the majority Jewish state of Israel and the majority Sunni Muslim occupied Palestinian territories, perhaps as low as 2 per cent overall.
Such tensions as there are between Jews and Christians here are primarily related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as Israel's control of sites holy to Christians, who are sometimes prevented from worshipping due to Israeli "closures" in the territories.
It is hardly surprising, then, that some Palestinian Christians have viewed this movie through a lens tainted by the conflict and occupation as well as an acute sense of being cast in a supporting role alongside the two other great faiths which stake a sacred claim to this biblical land, Judaism and Islam.
"There is a problem with this very small diminishing minority of Christians in this country who want to show that they still have a voice and they are still here," says Jack Persekian, director of the Al-Ma'mal Foundation for Contemporary Art, whose organisation recently hosted a discussion on the Gibson movie and other cinematic portrayals of Christ.
"There is that hidden tension that Christians, over so many years of occupation, are losing their weight in society. They feel vulnerable so they get excited about such a kind of film."
Seated in an art gallery close to the foundation's premises in the Christian quarter of the Old City, Jack, an Armenian Christian, adds that some viewers might also perceive the film as "a sort of get back" against the Israelis.
"People here have so much resentment and hatred against the Israelis. We feel, Christians and Muslims, that we have been maltreated and our land has been stolen by ever-expanding occupation and check points and the wall [the separation barrier Israel is constructing in the West Bank] and it's an endless and hopeless struggle with the Israelis. So maybe this film would make them say, 'you see, even the western world is seeing that they \ are the face of evil. I think in this kind of political atmosphere, where the Palestinians are feeling helpless and hopeless, such a kind of film would help boost them."
And in the daily drama of life here, where mutual suspicion between Israelis and Palestinians invariably plays a lead role, the word is out that a bootleg copy of The Passion being sold in Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem omits the final brief scene showing Christ's resurrection.
"People are saying that an Israeli distributed this copy," says the hotel manager with a straight face. "The Jews don't want to show that Christ rose from the dead again."