Benny Morris: Setting the record straight on Deir Yassin

[0:04]And uh for most of my adult life, I actually taught at the American Film Institute which at the time I went there, was considered to be about the best film school in America. And uh the problem was that uh they didn't really have very many students. They had uh they just started a teaching program. Uh they just started uh the MFA program, a graduate program. They probably had eight students in my teaching class, but actually had quite a big campus at the time, which was not bad for for teaching in. And it had really nice facilities, editing facilities, sound recording facilities, sound mixing facilities, screening rooms. It was really quite an impressive uh setup actually. And uh it was there at the film Institute that one of my colleagues uh decided to go up to the mountains with his family and uh to his surprise. Uh on the way there, he started looking through the forest, which was completely burned. And he saw something that was completely white just sticking out of the ground. And uh for some reason it appealed to him and he stopped the car. And he went up to it and uh to his surprise, it was a a human skeleton. So uh this uh intrigued him and he started poking at it, you know, he pulled out one of the bones. And uh the bone was completely white, like something that was boiled, like bone that has been bleached. And uh he picked it up and he took it home. And uh a couple of days later, the family was uh eating dinner and uh he asked his wife what she thought it was. And she said that she had no idea. So he told her that it was a human bone. And she was completely grossed out by this. So she made him throw it in the trash, which he did. But a couple of days later, he came back to me and he asked me what I thought about it. And uh I said to him that uh it would probably be interesting for us to go up and see what it was about. So, a couple of days later, we went up to the mountains and it was in the middle of October, which was not bad, a nice dry sunny day. And uh to our surprise, uh the body was actually still there. And uh it was a complete human skeleton. Uh we actually just picked it up and took it home. And uh we told our wives that uh we found it in the wild. So, they just were uh disgusted by this idea and they just told us to throw it in the trash, which we did. But actually we took it out of the trash and uh we went up to the uh Film Institute and we actually worked on it for two years. And it was there that we decided to make our first uh Actually, the short film which was a documentary.