A cinema verité road movie, Route 181 is an intriguing documentary collaboration between internationally acclaimed Palestinian and Israeli directors Michel Khleifi and Eyal Sivan. This film will offer no consolation to the viewer yearning for a perspective, but gestures instead towards a more enigmatic tone, neither objective nor subjective, that cannot be reduced to dubious neutrality. Khleifi and Sivan make a judicious use of the interview format, as they follow and remap the contours of the 1947 partition line, moving alongside familiar images and narratives of occupation, loss, and a peace that has not arrived-settlements, checkpoints, exclusionary migration policies, suicide attacks, archeological sites, racialized communities, ruins, war museums and memorials. Route 181 is a tour de force in that it allows something ambiguous to emerge that requires us to rethink the hyphen between Israel-Palestine beyond optimism or pessimism. Khleifi and Sivan manage to carve a courageous space not of naive reconciliation, but one that simply reminds us that forgetting is also a powerful faculty of memory, at once personal, political, and ethical. “How to forget” is perhaps to be found in a chilling interview with an Israeli soldier that turns unexpectedly into a fascinating discussion about Kafka's Before the Law. Coincidental? Are Khleifi and Sivan searching for a language of forgetting, like Kafka?