Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize several times. As a Palestinian gynaecologist practising in an Israeli hospital he was able to pass the strictly guarded checkpoints to Gaza without a hitch. His humanist perspective is expressed in words like these: “Do we need to be sick in order to understand that we are equal?” When the Israeli army attacked Abuelaish’s home in Gaza in January 2009 and three of his daughters died, he picked up the phone. On the other end of the line was Shlomi Eldar, a Channel 10 reporter who decided to broadcast his friend’s despair live to the Israeli audience. A historic television moment; the shelling of Gaza was terminated soon afterwards.
Director Tal Barda has given her portrait the same title as Izzeldin Abuelaish’s book, which was published in 2011. More than ten years after the publication of this memoir, the doctor as well as his now grown-up children speak out in her film, talk about traumas, their new beginning in Toronto and the struggle to obtain an official apology from Israel. “I Shall Not Hate” addresses the complicated ties between the fates of Palestine and Israel. Izzeldin Abuelaish’s conviction that peaceful coexistence is the only chance of survival remains unbroken.

Maybe it really was the innocent hand of an infant clasping a soldier’s index finger that was to determine the course of three lives. Lives that did not end in early death after all, but continued in the asylum of a foreign country. The Rutikaras reside on the outskirts of the capital of Rwanda and call their newborn child Justice, because justice is really becoming scarce in their country. In the spring of 1994, when the little boy is six months old, the political situation is getting increasingly tense, the Tutsi ethnic minority is being hunted, abused and murdered by the Hutu militias. In the summer of that year, the world learned of the extent of the violence: a genocide with hundreds of thousands killed. The Rutikaras are affected, too. But with luck, chance and their unperturbable baby they manage to save themselves in the care of the United Nations.
Director Justice Rutikara, born in Kigali and grown up in Quebec, is the son of Valentine and Jean-Claude, who report from offscreen. His first animated film, carried by broadly coloured images, an impressive factuality and mild poetry, is a memento that rises above the individual and takes on a universal note in the chorus of human sounds, all the unifying and threatening ones.