Yossi - a new film by Eytan Fox

Award-winning filmmaker Eytan Fox is best known for his films dealing with strongly delineated characters and homosexuality, incorporating a strong use of artistic design and aesthetic elements.

Born in New York in 1964, Fox immigrated to Israel with his family at a young age and grew up in Jerusalem.  He studied at the Dept. of Film and TV at Tel Aviv University.  He made two films about homosexuality in the Israeli army: Time-Off (1990), a short drama which won First Prize at the Munich Student Film Festival; Yossi and Jagger (2002), which won Honorable Mention for TV drama at the Jerusalem Film Festival.

Fox's first feature film, Song of the Siren (1994), based on the acclaimed novel by Irit LInur, was one of the most popular Israeli films of the 1990s.  His dramatic television series  Florentene (1997-99), based on the American TV series, Friends, which examines the lives of young people in Tel Aviv, won First Prize in the television category at Jerusalem (1997).  His short musical comedy, Gotta Have Heart (1997), won a prize for Best Short at the New York NewFest (1999).  

 His highly acclaimed and award-winning Walk on Water (2003) is a complex film about the emotional  baggage that Israeli men carry as a result of living in a society at war (see previous review on this blog). His most recent feature film, The Bubble (2006), is about the homosexual scene on Sheinkin St., about the terrible divide between Palestinians and Israelis, and the humiliations that Palestinians face on a daily basis contrasted with some of the everyday life in Tel Aviv.

Eytan Fox's latest film, Yossi, which premiered recently at the Tribeca FIlm Festival and is currently playing in Israeli cinemas, is a sequel to Yossi and Jagger.  Ten years after Jagger died in Yossi's arms during the war in Lebanon, Yossi (Ohad Knoller) is still in the closet.  He is a cardiologist in a Tel Aviv hospital, but has not had a love relationship of any kind since his deep attachment to Jagger during his army service.  Red-eyed and haggard looking, he is desperately lonely and in need of a vacation.  Driving to Eilat for some time off, he picks up a group of soldiers, also on their way to party and vacation in Eilat. 

According to Eytan Fox (interviewed on Israeli Radio Reshet Bet, last week), "I left the image of Yossi in a not very good place, and I decided to return to try to change that."  He explained that the story is a variation on his own life, on the path that he himself experienced, and also it is about how Israeli society has changed.  Ten years have gone by and Israeli society has changed, but Yossi is still stuck where he was at the end of the previous film.

Music is beautifully integrated -- as it is in all of Fox's films.  But Yossi and Jagger was a different kind of film -- produced on the background of war, it had much tension and drama.  This film is more about life and learning how to love again.  Gestures and glances are crucial elements -- rather than action and drama -- making the film more of a psychological study than a narrative film. 

 

Watch a promo on youtube

On Screen: Women in Israel Film

Check out the article that I had published in today's Jerusalem Post --
on the subject of the potential of women in Israeli society as reflected in images from the screen!

Jerusalem Post, p. 13, May 15, 2012 

On screen: The special role of women

By AMY KRONISH

Women are so often the victims of violence, abuse and humiliations. On the other hand, women have incredible strength and determination.

While attending DocAviv this past week in Tel Aviv, I saw films

about women in conflict situations – one about the Central African Republic and how rape was used there as a tool in wartime; about women struggling to obtain an education in Syria; and about Palestinian women desperately trying to earn a living. It’s not exactly news, but it is certainly clear that women are so often the victims of violence, abuse and humiliations perpetrated by men. On the other hand, women have incredible strength and determination.

As a result, instead of accepting abuse that is dished out, women can have a special role within difficult situations – they have the ability to take risks on a human level; they can reach out to each other, joining hands for common cause; and they can encourage human understanding and reconciliation.

In analyzing Israeli and Palestinian feature films of recent years, unique roles for women have often been depicted.

In this article, I will analyze two films on a political level and two on a human level in which women play strong central roles and demonstrate their unique abilities.

In Eran Riklis’s The Lemon Tree (2008), a Palestinian woman and a Jewish woman, who live on different sides of a grove of lemon trees, try to communicate across the divide. The Palestinian woman, Salma, is in a position of weakness politically and socially, but is strong in her determination and her courage. The Jewish woman, Mira, on the other hand, is in a position of strength politically, but she is weak in the face of the platitudes that her husband spouts.

Although she does not want to be a party to the uprooting of her neighbor’s lemon trees, she is unable to stop it.

According to Riklis, Salma is an Erin Brockovich character, going on a legal journey for what is right. She is also a woman linked to Mother Earth, a fertile woman – as a mother and grandmother, and more symbolically, she is tied to the fruit of the land, her lemon grove.

The two women look out at each other’s homes, across the divide. They are both victims of the male leadership of their societies that keep them apart, victims of the conflict, and also victims of their roles within their own society.

In addition they are silenced by issues of security which seem to trump all other human needs and considerations.

But they both undergo change as a result of their non-verbal communications.

Similarly, in Palestinian films, women have been portrayed as having a unique role, one that enables them to break through certain situations in ways that men could never do.

In Elia Suleiman’s award-winning Divine Intervention (2002), for example, the main role is played by a woman who offers determination and ultimately victory. In a striking scene, she strides confidently through a checkpoint, making eye contact with the soldiers. The soldiers are mesmerized by the welldressed and self-confident woman, lowering their guns. This shakes the foundations of the checkpoint, which slowly begins to fall over.

The filmmaker is showing that when women use their wiles and strengths – exploiting their female potential, showing determination, demonstrating self confidence – they can make a powerful impact, more powerful perhaps than guns and checkpoints.

On a more human level, and different from the critical and political nature of the previous films, women are also capable of taking risks and making matters right when it comes to issues dealing with those who are close to them.

Ayelet Menahemi’s Noodle (2007) is a dramatic and sensitive story about an El Al flight attendant named Miri, who tries to offer assistance to a foreign worker and her child. Miri’s Chinese housekeeper is suddenly deported, leaving Miri with the woman’s six-year-old boy. As a childless woman, Miri quickly becomes very attached to the child, and, as a result, she becomes determined to take great risks to bring him home to his mother.

Most of the time, we shirk our responsibilities by denying the capacity of each and every one of us to do tikun olam, to heal the world. Yet, here an amazing woman risks her career and her life to make the world a better place through caring and compassionate action for the child of a foreign worker. She is one woman who demonstrates clearly that women can make a difference. According to Menahemi, taking a risk and reuniting the boy with his mother was a redemptive act.

Eran Kolirin also makes a comment about the role of women on a more human level in his acclaimed The Band’s Visit (2008). Here a lonely woman is able to assist the members of the Egyptian police band who mistakenly end up in her small town on the edge of nowhere. Although this is not a situation of conflict per se, it is a metaphor for the greater Arab-Israeli conflict.

Through her humanity, kindness and sensitivity to the needs of others, she is able to create a human encounter for people who pass in the night, providing them with the unique opportunity to both give and receive.

These are just a small sample of films about women in Israeli society that have been made over the past decade.

More will continue to be made since it is clear that women play unique roles – through their caring, compassion and deep commitment – dealing with many social and political issues that affect Israeli society.

Perhaps if we were to learn from the determination, capacity for taking risks and making a difference, and the success in human encounters – all made possible by women – we would be able to bring about greater change in our part of the world.

The writer is the author of two books on Israeli film and frequently lectures on the subject.

Gay Men From Palestine Can't Find their Place

At DOCAVIV film festival last week, I saw a wonderful  documentary about gay Palestinians who have been forced to flee their families and communities in Palestine and are living illegally in Tel Aviv.  The Invisible Men, directed by Yariv Mozer, won a special jury honorable mention at the festival. 

Louie, 32-years-old, is a charming man, but he has no permanent home, no community, nowhere that he belongs.   He is a gay Palestinian, living illegally in Tel Aviv, who misses his family terribly.  About ten years before, he ran away when his father, having learned that he is gay, attacked him with a knife.  Abdu, also living and hiding in Tel Aviv, is more social than Louie and he has built for himself a community there.  Faris, 23-years-old, has escaped almost certain death at the hands of his family.  These men live in limbo in Tel Aviv -- their society has turned its back on them and Israel refuses to provide them with a refuge of any kind.   Eventually they find assistance from a group of lawyers at a Legal Clinic at Tel Aviv University who help them to seek refuge in an unidentified European country.

During the Q&A, May 11, 2012 at DOCAVIV, filmmaker Yariv Mozer explained that this film was three years in the making.  "It was shocking to me that in Tel Aviv in my community people live like this -- this is why it was my responsibility to make this film."  When asked why these men don't receive asylum in Israel, he said that the lawyers at the clinic explained that there are two reasons -- one is security and the other is the fear of a precedent in the matter of absorbing Palestinian refugees.

The filmmakers succeed in keeping a balance, criticizing both Israeli and Palestinian societies equally for not accepting these men in their midst. 

The Invisible Men (documentary, 2012, 68 minutes) was produced by Mozer Films, Ltd.

The Kafkaesque Occupation

White Nights is a hard-hitting documentary film about a group of women from Deheishe (a refugee camp near Bethlehem), all of them mothers, some single mothers, all struggling to support their children --  Fatma, 50 years-old, is divorced and supports four children;  Iman, 28 years-old, supports three;  Najah, 47 years-old, supports eight;  Jamila, 65 years-old, supports eight.  These women work as cleaning ladies in Jewish homes, on the other side of the separation barrier/security fence  in Jerusalem.  One says, "We work to survive, to keep our dignity."  But they do not have work permits to enter Israel, so they set out every morning at about 2 or 2:30 a.m. on a journey to climb up hills, cross wadis, and crawl under barbed wire fences in their determination to get to work and to support their children.  On these tense and difficult journeys, the women talk and share about their lives, their hardships and their dreams.  They live in constant fear of being caught, but they do not allow this to deter them.

As one very well-dressed woman takes off her hijab in order to blend in on the streets of Israel, she also changes from her walking shoes into elegant sandals because "you should look good, it gives you confidence." 

 

At the premiere screening at the DOCAVIV festival yesterday, filmmaker Irit Gal reported that the film was three years in production and it was photographed over many days and nights, under very difficult circumstances, following the women in total darkness, climbing rocky hillsides, fleeing from Israeli military patrols.   She also related that the women documented in the film asked her last summer, when Israelis were demonstrating for social justice, "Where is the solidarity from Israelis to support us.   We are the workers trying to support our families."   It is true that the Israeli social protest movement did not include Palestinians of the West Bank, not men or women, who are suffering terribly under the Occupation.  Mosh  Danon, one of the producers of the film, described the reality portrayed in the film as a symptom of the "absurd world that we live in here."

White Nights (perhaps better titled Sleepless Nights in English), documentary, directed by Irit Gal, 47 minutes, is available from Mosh Danon, Inosan Productions, mosh@inosan.co.il

Six Million and One

Six Million and One is a feature-length documentary made by David Fisher, currently playing in Israeli cinemas.  Fisher worked for many years as director of the New Fund for Film and TV, one of the most important jobs in the Israeli film industry.  His newest documentary, according to Nirit Anderman of Ha'aretz,  "reveals the bleeding insides of one family, which was forced, like many others, for many years, to live a seemingly normal life in the shadow of the Holocaust, a permanent, invisible presence in their home." 

The film focuses on Fisher and his three siblings as they travel back to Austria to the camp where their father was a slave laborer.  My friend, Phil Bloom, describes this is as "one of the best portrayals of how the children of a survivor cope and don't cope with the legacy."

Doma by Ameer Haddad

This documentary film, which was reviewed last year on this blog, is an important film about sexual abuse within the Palestinian community.  Watch a reporting on the RealNews Network about the film and how Palestinian teenage girls are reacting to the message of the film.  

Dolphin Boy

My husband and I had the opportunity to view a wonderfully heartwarming documentary film last night -- Dolphin Boy by Dani Menken and Yonatan Nir.  This is a remarkable story of rebirth and hope. 

Morad is a teenager from the Arab village of Kalansua, in the center of Israel, near Netanya.  He was brutally beaten by a bunch of thugs in his village and, as a result, suffered severe post-traumatic stress and became highly uncommunicative.  His behavior deteriorated as he began to display bouts of anger within his family setting.  After many standard attempts to help him, the remarkably thoughtful and humanistic doctor recommended dolphin therapy, hoping that the non-verbal communication of the dolphins would succeed where traditional verbal therapy had failed.

Here is a teenage boy who does not respond or communicate at all and slowly we watch as the dolphin therapy, his relationship with the staff of the Dolphin Reef in Eilat, the support of his father, the dedication of his doctor, the sunshine of Eilat, and the love of a young woman, all help to bring him back to learn to function normally in human society.

Including stunning under-water photography, this is a story of Arab-Jewish relations with no apparent political message, except that we can do wonderful things together when given the chance and when extraordinary human beings care deeply and persist in helping cure a boy who would have been otherwise written off as hopeless by many in our society.  This is  a deeply moving film about building a new life, rebirth and self-understanding.

Available from Go2Films. 
[Photo by Amos Nachoum.]