The Movie:

I'd be shocked if there isn't at least one Hollywood studio developing The Green Prince as a feature. The true story of the son of a Hamas leader secretly collaborating with the Shin Bet, Israel's internal security service, in order to cut down on the amount of innocent lives that would have been taken by Hamas' terrorist attacks is ripe for an awards season prestige political thriller. In a perfect world, Mark Boal and Katherine Bigelow would collaborate for a third time in order to bring this story to the big screen. Until then, we have Nadav Schirman's excellent documentary to relay this extraordinary story to the audience.

Schirman cleverly employs a fairly simple visual and narrative approach in order to construct the tale of Mosab Hassan Yousef, a.k.a. The Green Prince. A majority of the film's running time is devoted to interviews with the film's two main subjects, Mosab and his Shin Bet handler, Gonen Ben Yitzhak. Schirman manages to get surprisingly honest and open testimonials from Mosab and Gonen about the decade they spent working together to stop terrorist attacks. This is quite an achievement, especially considering the fact that we're dealing with two people who relied on lies and secrecy in order to survive for almost their entire lives.

During the interviews, Mosab especially comes across as a man who simply did not want the blood of innocent people on his hands. After being arrested for his involvement in his father's Hamas-related work, Mosab is forced by the Shin Bet and his assigned handler Gonen to work as an informant. At first, his plan is to pretend to work for Israel until they let him go, but upon seeing the true face of Hamas, which went against pretty much everything he learned about his faith growing up, he uses the position forced upon him to prevent terrorism and strike a blow to the violent extremism taking over Palestine from the inside.

Even though Mosab's motivation in collaborating with Israel is refreshingly pure, he exists in a world full of grey areas. Eventually, he realizes that Israel is using him as nothing but a pawn to further their own political goals and once they're done with his services, they hang him out to dry and willfully put his life in danger. That's where his burgeoning friendship with Gonen comes in and the story of The Green Prince, a concept for a dry political thriller on paper, turns into quite a touching allegory for peace between conflicting cultures via the bond between Gonen and Mosab.

Perhaps frustrated at the fact that he knew this story to be perfect material for a feature, Schirman utilizes a lot of flashy editing techniques while intercutting Mosab and Gonen's interviews with skillfully executed reenactments. While his attempt at creating a thriller-like atmosphere can become a bit distracting at times, it doesn't take away from the power of Mosab and Gonen's honest and at times heartbreaking confessions about how much they sacrificed in the name of peace.

The Blu-Ray:

Video:

A lot of contemporary documentaries employ HD cinematography that can have that overtly clean, bright and crisp look, especially during interview segments. In that sense, The Green Prince's grainy, gray and green dominated cinematography offers a relatively fresh visual variation on the norm. It also fits the ambiguous and dark tone of the story. The Blu-Ray's 1080p transfer stays loyal to the source and showcases a rich and layered look.

Audio:

For a documentary, The Green Prince offers a surprisingly vibrant audio mix that puts the viewer in the middle of the story. The creative sound effects used during the reenactment footage are accentuated with Max Richter's intense score. The DTS-HD 5.1 presentation offers a clean transfer that even shows some surround presence at times.

Extras:

Documentary Television Special: A 30-minute interview with Nadav Schirman that should provide those interested to learn more about the story and how the documentary project came together with a lot of material to chew on.

Israeli TV News Segment: A brief news segment broadcast after Gonen's story was made public.

Bonus Interview Extracts: About ten minutes of extra interview footage. Some interesting stuff, but can mostly be skipped.

We also get a Trailer and a Booklet explaining the roles of Hamas and the Shin Bet in the Palestinian-Israel conflict.

Final Thoughts:

If you have friends or relatives with a black-and-white outlook on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, The Green Prince is one of the best documentaries you can show them to prove that nothing about it is as simplistic as we might sometimes want it to be. There aren't any clear good and bad guys as good and evil exists on both sides. However, it shows that there are also people on either side putting their lives on the line for the goal of a possible peace, no matter how unlikely it might be.

Oktay Ege Kozak is a film critic and screenwriter based in Portland, Oregon. He also writes for The Playlist, The Oregon Herald, and Beyazperde.com