Sometimes a great story is enough to overcome mediocre storytelling, and that’s the case with the documentary “The Green Prince.” The b-roll is repetitive, the interviewees leave holes in the narrative and the dramatizations can verge on the cheesy. Oh, but what a tale.
Based on Mosab Hassan Yousef’s memoir “Son of Hamas,” the film recounts how Yousef went from being the protege of his father, one of Hamas’ founders, to a spy for the Israeli intelligence organization Shin Bet. It all started when Yousef, at age 17, decided to buy some guns. Having been brought up on the West Bank and seeing his father arrested again and again, Yousef became angry at Israel. “My father didn’t tell me how to hate,” he says in the film, but hate he did, and violence seemed justified. But Israeli intelligence already had an eye on Yousef, and he was arrested before he could plot an attack.
During a long interrogation, Yousef agreed to spy for Israel. He had no intention of actually passing along information, but he saw it as a way out of the torturous inquiry. But Yousef was sent to prison anyway, and it was there that he became acquainted with another side to Hamas. As he tells it, the organization ruled the prison, and members would routinely torture and kill inmates suspected of spying. Many were innocent. Suddenly Yousef found himself in a moral quandary, and he ultimately decided to work for Israel.
The only other interviewee in Israeli director Nadav Schirman’s film is Yousef’s handler, Gonen Ben Yitzhak, who says that enlisting Yousef — code name the Green Prince — was “like recruiting the son of the Israeli prime minister.”
