Watching the new film Budrus, the parallels between history’s great nonviolent resistance movements and recent events in a small Palestinian town become impossible to miss.

Named for the town in which a remarkable standoff unfolds, the documentary by Brazilian filmmaker Julia Bacha tells the story of an olive-growing village that utilizes peaceful protests to stop the Israel Border Police from building a wall designed to keep Palestinians out of Israel. The people of Budrus react partly to the wall’s symbolism, but mostly because the barbed-wire barrier is set to run through their olive farms. The olives have provided their livelihood for generations, and the wall would kill most of the trees.

The film, released Tuesday on DVD and screening Wednesday at the United Nations, caught our eye because successful nonviolent protests are an angle often forgotten in today’s stories about the Middle East. Ronit Avni, founder of Just Vision, the politically and religiously unaffiliated organization behind the film, said it’s a common outlook.

“So many Americans and Israelis look at the conflict and have been asking: Where is the Palestinian Gandhi, where is their nonviolent movement?” she said. “Palestinians believe they had tried nonviolence in the 1980s, but that it doesn’t work. We wanted to address that gap in perception through the film.”

Ayed Morrar, a Palestinian resident of Budrus who spent six years in an Israeli jail yet says he harbors no ill will toward the country, plays the role of peacemaker and organizer in the documentary. As he stands in a room of angry men meeting about the wall’s impending construction, he holds court.

“We must empty our minds of traditional thinking,” he tells the group calmly, “and start being strategic.”

In more than 55 demonstrations, Morrar, his family, the village of Budrus and eventually supporters from Israel and the international community stage peaceful protests in and around the olive groves. After 10 months, the Israeli government reroutes the containment wall’s construction to the outskirts of the village.

Perhaps the greatest source of emotional leverage in Budrus is the footage, captured by a variety of people.

“We had to track down hundreds of hours of archival footage,” Avni told Wired.com by phone from her office in Washington, D.C. “There was always a camera present, but it was never the same person filming, and the people holding cameras weren’t there with the intention of making a real movie.”

In a scene echoing the famous picture from Tiananmen Square, the viewer is given firsthand shots of Morrar’s lioness daughter as she calmly sits in front of an encroaching earthmover so it can’t destroy any more of the farms. The film also lets us peer over the shoulders of Israel Border Police as they repel protesters with stun grenades.

Though the story is about nonviolent protest, that isn’t to say there isn’t conflict. At one point, teenagers from Budrus throw rocks at soldiers, and the Israel Border Police retaliate with gas and live rounds.

The scene highlights a common, long-held Palestinian belief that, in a David-versus-Goliath sense, the act of stone-throwing is a “nonviolent” protest against a mechanized army equipped with rifles, grenades and armored vehicles. The logic is, “What could a little stone plinking against a tank be, other than symbolic?”

Still, the women of Budrus implore the stone-throwers to stop, for fear of escalation. For the most part, the rest of the resistance scenes are simply protesters and farmers standing in front of the olive trees chanting for peace.

The power of the nonviolent story, especially from such a tumultuous region of the world, leaves one thinking — perhaps the most important effect for any documentary. Our hope is that more stories of peaceful resistance such as this can be told in the future.