The Wanted 18
| The Wanted 18 | |
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The Wanted 18 official poster
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| Directed by | |
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| Based on | true story |
| Music by | Benoit Charest |
| Cinematography | Daniel Villeneuve, Germán Gutierrez |
| Distributed by | NFB, Kino Lorber |
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Release date
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Running time
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75 minutes |
| Country | Palestine, Canada, France |
| Language | Arabic, English, Hebrew |
The Wanted 18 is a 2014 Canadian-Palestinian animated documentary about the efforts of Palestinians in Beit Sahour to start a small local dairy industry during the First Intifada, hiding a herd of 18 dairy cows from Israeli security forces when the dairy collective was deemed a threat to Israel's national security. The film combines documentary interviews with those involved in the events, archival footage, drawings, black-and-white stop-motion animation as well as re-enactments, and was co-directed by Canadian filmmaker Paul Cowan and Palestinian visual artist and director Amer Shomali. The film was the Palestinian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 88th Academy Awards but was not nominated.
In the 1980s, as part of a Palestinian boycott of Israeli taxation and commodities, residents of Beit Sahour decided to form a collective and stop purchasing milk from Israeli companies, in a quest for greater self-sufficiency. They purchased cows from a sympathetic kibbutznik and set about teaching themselves how to care for the animals and milk them—even sending a member to the United States to learn dairy farming. The farm was a success, with strong local demand for “Intifada milk.” However, the herd was declared a “threat to the national security of the state of Israel” and Israel sought to impound the cows, forcing Palestinians to devise ways to keep them hidden.
The film is framed as being told from the point of view of the cows—Rikva, Ruth, Lola and Goldie, who appear in humorous Claymation animated sequences. The filmmakers intended The Wanted 18 to have a comic book feel, even shooting live-action interviews at an angle to replicate the look of comic book panels. The director intended to use the cows point-of-view as a way for audience to sympathize with the subject matter. For Shomali, laughter is a way of non-violent disobedience.
The idea for the film began in Shomali’s boyhood, spent largely at a Syrian refugee camp where his main escape had been reading comic books, one of which dealt with the story of the Beit Sahour cows. Montreal-based producer Ina Fichman first heard of the story when a group of producers and broadcasters at a documentary-pitch event Ramallah. Shomali's original intention had been to make a short animated film on the story. However, Fichman believed it had the makings of a feature documentary and approached veteran Montreal-based documentary filmmaker Paul Cowan. The project took nearly five years to complete—a lengthy process due to the time involved in creating the animation as well as the fact that Shomali and his Canadian collaborators lived thousands of miles apart.
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