The documentary was shot almost entirely by Palestinian farmer Emad Burnat, who bought his first camera in 2005 to record the birth of his youngest son.

When his fourth son, Gibreel, is born in 2005, self-taught cameraman Emad Burnat, a Palestinian villager, gets his first camera.

Eventually, in 2009, Burnat approaches Guy Davidi,[5] an Israeli filmmaker, and the two of them create the film from these five broken cameras and the stories that they represent.

[6] Discovering that the wall would cut through their agricultural land, confiscating half of it, the villagers initiated popular protests and were joined by Israeli and international activists.

In 2007 the Israeli Supreme Court ordered the barrier rerouted,[6] and four years later, after village access to some of the land was restored, the demonstrations were called off.

[7] A case against Canada, for failing to prevent Canadian corporations from being complicit in the building of the settlements, is currently pending before the UN Human Rights Committee.[when?]

His footage was introduced as evidence in Israeli court and posted on YouTube to spread awareness of the growing movement.

He started working as a freelance photographer for Reuters and provided footage documenting the villagers' fight to professional filmmakers.

This footage was used in such notable films as Shai Carmeli Pollac's Bil'in, My Love and Guy Davidi's and Alesandre Goetschmann's Interrupted Streams.

A few important scenes shot by other cameramen (including Guy Davidi) were used to supplement the narrative, and to introduce Burnat as a character.

In 2011 French editor Véronique Lagoarde–Ségot joined the project to edit the final cut of the 90-minute film and to create the 52-minute television version.

The film takes the form of a diary, and is divided into 5 sections, each of which recounts the story of one of the five cameras that Burnat used over the years.

The story shifts frequently between the dramatic public events in the village and the highly intimate scenes involving Burnat's family.

Still later, funding was provided by Israel's Channel 8, Dutch Television IKON, and sources in Canada, South Korea, and the UK.

Scott of The New York Times while stating that the film was "unlikely to persuade anyone with a hardened view of the issue to think again" and was a "hardly neutral...piece of advocacy journalism", also said that it was a "visual essay in autobiography and, as such, a modest, rigorous and moving work of art" that deserved "to be appreciated for the lyrical delicacy of [Burnat's] voice and the precision of his eye.

"[12] Artinfo magazine's J. Hoberman noted that the documentary was "gripping from the get go" and that seeing it is to "wonder what it would have been like to have a black Alabaman's 8mm documentation of the civil rights struggle.

"[13] Joshua Rothkopf of Time Out New York gave the film four stars, describing it as a "proudly defiant work, devoted to a community and created by its members" that shows the "largely unreported details" of normal life in the West Bank.

[14] An NPR review of the film noted that it "is unabashedly pro-Palestinian, an indictment of Israel's settlement policy that never examines either the settlers' claims or the security forces' point of view" and quoted Anav Silverman of the Tazpit News Agency as saying that "the conflict in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] has become a camera war.

Both directors, Guy Davidi and Emat Burnat, also appeared on the cover of the cultural weekend section of Israel's leading newspaper, Yediot Achronot.

Davidi said that when he first screened the film for Israeli high school students, "they got angry at me, accused me of lying and being a traitor.