Late Summer Blues Director Renen Schorr Creates a Personal Memoir

Wake Up, Grandson – Letters to My Rebellious Rabbi (המעורר) is a documentary film, directed and written by Renen Schorr Heller.  Renen Schorr is well-known in Israel for two major achievements – he directed the iconic 1986 film, Late Summer Blues, and he was the founding director of the Sam Spiegel Film and TV School in Jerusalem, which now sits in one of four buildings in a major impressive cultural complex in downtown Jerusalem.  Schorr served for 30 years in that position from 1989 to 2018.

 In this sophisticated documentary film, he has combined three elements -- a personal memoir, the story of the state of Israel (since its establishment in 1948), and the story of his grandfather who had a profound impact on his life.  In so doing, he combines documentary footage, family movies and stills, and even some re-enactments. The results are a fabulous interweaving, with superb editing and excellent cinematography (particularly of Jerusalem and Safed).

Schorr’s grandfather, Rabbi Avraham Zeida Heller, was an orthodox rabbi, fourth generation in Safed. In fact, his own grandfather had been the chief rabbi of Safed in the early 19^th century!  Rabbi Avraham Zeida Heller was the head of a Safed yeshivah during the War of Independence and was known for believing in both the importance of prayer and military defense.  He is quoted in the film as saying: “It is important to recite Psalms, but the miracle was when the Palmach arrived!” He was married with five daughters, one of whom was the mother of Renen Schorr. 

The film is centered around many years of an exchange of letters between the grandfather and the grandson.  The elder is forever begging his grandson (in literary Hebrew) to give up his love of Truffaut and to follow the path of Uri Zohar, to carry on the Jewish tradition. [Uri Zohar, who was a hero to Schorr in his early years of filmmaking in the 1970s, was a famous Israeli filmmaker who gave up film for a life as an ultra-orthodox rabbi.]

In this poignantly personal film, Schorr portrays his growing up, his living through the War of Attrition with Egypt (1969-1970), army life, his service as a war correspondent, the horrors of the Yom Kippur War of 1973, his gradual falling in love with the field of cinema and his profession as a teacher and filmmaker.  The descriptions of the hardships of producing a full-length feature film as a young artist were eye-opening.  Moreover, the footage that he found and used in the film was stupendous, including footage from Late Summer Blues itself. This famous film was well-known in Israel for its satirical criticism of the War of Attrition with Egypt. The screenplay raised many critical questions about the goals and futility of war, which are particularly relevant for our current situation in Israel today, when we are fighting two wars of attrition.

In 1989, Schorr was chosen by Teddy Kollek, the popular mayor of Jerusalem, to head a new film school which was being established at that time.  Schorr had to contend with the obstacle of drawing secular film students away from Tel Aviv and bringing them to Jerusalem.

The film reveals the tensions in Israeli society between the religious and secular, between the film world of Tel Aviv and the dreams of Teddy Kollek for Jerusalem, between the holiness of Safed and the hedonism of Tel Aviv. 

Schorr’s grandfather lived well into his 90’s and a final request is sent to his grandson – make a movie about me.  Towards the end of the film, Schorr changes his name officially to Renen Schorr Heller, as a beautiful way of memorializing his grandfather, and he undertakes to direct a scene which was written by his grandfather and which takes place at the turn of the 20^th century in Safed. 

Wake Up, Grandson is an extraordinary documentary film (93 minutes) – beautifully conceived, with great pacing, which combines the personal and the national in an  effortless way.

The film is available from Go2Films.

 

 

Combining the Personal and National

One of my favorite documentary film styles is the personal documentary which combines the personal and the national.

In her new prizewinning film, Wall, filmmaker Moran Ifergan combines her own personal story with so many of the issues that divide us in contemporary Israel.  A graduate of the Sam Spiegel Film and Television School in Jerusalem, Ifergan is from a traditional, religious, Moroccan family in Beersheba.  She herself was religious until the age of 18. Two of Moran Ifergan’s previous documentary films were reviewed on this blog.

Ifergan has made an interesting artistic decision to combine a personal soundtrack of phone-calls, discussions and What’s App messages together with visuals, mostly from the women’s section at the Kotel.  She spent a full year filming at the Kotel, around the clock, searching for meaningful and life-transforming events.  Why the Kotel?  She admits that the film deals with faith, gender issues, problems of young couples, loneliness, and family – on the personal level.  And with issues of holiness, religion, politics, and nationalism -- on the national level. What better venue could be chosen to talk about questions of religion in her life and issues of nationalism -- and combine it all with the intimacy and confessional nature of talking about her own personal story. 

And why is the soundtrack the only place where the personal exists in the film, creating a distance and making it so that we never see the filmmaker, only hear her conversations throughout?  She offers two reasons for this: “I use my personal story to talk about something more universal. Also, I wanted to deal with how a personality can be represented by sound and not by picture.”  It’s amazing how well this technique succeeds, creating two parallel stories – one in the soundtrack and one in the visual.

Ifergan is a young mother going through a divorce.  Her recorded conversations are with her mother, her sister, and her close friend.  Her traditional and old-fashioned mother does not approve of her life choices – not of her filmmaking and not of her splitting with her husband of three years.  On the other hand, her best friend relates to her loneliness and lifestyle crisis honestly and openly in their recorded conversations. 

One night, along comes a religious woman who tells her that she can see in her eyes that she is missing inner peace.  And she proceeds to tell her all about mikveh, and the spirit of God that you can let into your life by fulfilling the laws of family purity. This dialogue is an example of the filmmaker’s letting us in to encounter her own grappling with religion and a religious lifestyle. She also draws our attention to the ultra-nationalism of Jerusalem Day with its flag waving and its indoctrination of our young people.  We catch a glimpse of the military ceremonies at the Kotel and the tears of Memorial Day.  But most importantly we become involved up close and intimate with dozens of young girls and women praying at the Kotel.

Wall (documentary, 64 minutes) provides a fascinating look at issues that are important to us – how we relate to Jerusalem, to the Kotel, to a religious lifestyle, to anti-Arab feeling and fanatic nationalism.  The film is available from Cinephil.

The People Want Social Justice

During the summer of 2011, Israel saw a major social protest which arose from a groundswell of young people trying to battle the high cost of living, especially the high cost of housing.  At that time, Daphni Leef was a film student who was having trouble paying her rent, so she decided to give up her apartment and pitched a tent on Rothschild Blvd., inviting others to join her via facebook.  Little did she know what she was getting into!

Slowly the movement grew, until it took on major proportions, which literally hundreds of thousands joined from all over Israel.  The slogan of the movement was “The People want Social Justice” and Daphni Leef found herself at the center of this almost uncontrollable event. 

The opening film at the DOCAVIV film festival, a few days ago, was the documentary film, Before My Feet Touch the Ground (לפני שהרגלים נוגעות בקרקע) directed by Daphni Leef.  This compelling film is both about her and about the movement.  It is a highly personal piece, as the filmmaker has decided to turn the camera on herself, so that we can see how one person is affected as she is trying to change the world. We see moments of great satisfaction and moments of despair, frustration, issues of ego, even some violence.  Eventually the tent city was shut down by the authorities.  This film provides an introspective look at herself, at what she went through, how she put herself on the line, how so many people were counting on her, and how it all just literally fizzled out. 

One minister in the right-wing government (Miri Regev) called the protesters left-wing radicals, because they shouted so much and wouldn’t let her speak when she came to the tent camp.  It was a funny moment, because there was no political side in this social protest movement, and also because it has become a regular slogan of the current government to blame everything on the left as if it is a dirty word!

Leef concludes the film with a mantra: “Open your eyes, close your eyes.” Open your eyes and see the inequality and the need for change.  Close your eyes and hide from the burden, the responsibility.  At the end, you are left dreaming – we must continue to dream – and we want to know where a charismatic woman such as Daphni Leef is going from here!

Before My Feet Touch the Ground is a documentary film, 87 minutes in length.

The Story of a Family

My Beloved Uncles, directed by Eran Barak, is a compelling look at a neighborhood, a quirky family, and a quest for dreams and hopes. Produced in the style of a personal documentary, the film also covers the phenomenon of kidnapped Sephardi babies during the early years of the state.  This is not just a standard documentary -- it also makes use of creative elements which add to its unique nature.

Pardes Katz, north of B'nai Brak, was an immigrant community built in the 1950s, later turned into a slum.  Today, the filmmaker says he can't run away from it.  His grandparents, who came from Tunisia, raised their family here.  They had a son named Yisrael, born in 1949, who disappeared from the local hospital when he was almost a year old. The family was never shown a body or a burial site.  The filmmaker takes us to meet his grandmother who till this day believes that he was taken from her by the Ashkenazim and is still alive, living somewhere in Israel.

 

The beloved and lovable uncles make the film so quirky and special.  Uncle Gabi, for example, is a real character, who lived most of his life in Israeli prisons.  He talks about how he always wanted to fit in, to be like other people, and to prove it, he wanted to have an Ashkenazi wife.  But realizing one's dreams is not always within reach.  Another uncle talks about how he wasn't like Gabi -- although they were very close, he never stole anything, except for a few cars here and there!  And a third uncle still drives around in a horse-drawn buggy, collecting scrap metal, searching for a wife.  

My Beloved Uncles (documentary, 72 minutes) is available from Ruth Diskin Films.

The Life Story of Margot Klausner

Saga of a Photo, directed by Mooly Landesman, tells the fascinating life story of Margot Klausner -- a woman of great courage and vision, who is credited with being among the founders of the Habimah National Theater in the 1930s and responsible for the building of the first film studio in 1949.  Based on her diary entries, family photos, home movies, personal letters, and using dramatic re-enactments, her granddaughter tells the story of her life in this extraordinary documentary film. 

The film begins with this photo of Margot's wedding in 1926 Berlin to her first husband, Jacques Rosner.  During their honeymoon in Palestine, it is already clear that the young and elegant Margot is excited about the possibilities and challenges of life in Eretz Yisrael.  Her father owned a shoe factory and a chain of shoe stores throughout Europe.  She becomes involved with the Habimah actors who came to Berlin in those years and builds a special relationship with the manager, Yehoshua Brandstatter.  At that time, the actors were not all convinced that they wanted to make aliyah.  But Klausner and Brandstatter prove to be a formidable team, and using some of her family money, they bring the theater troupe to Tel Aviv where they establish the national theater and are part of its management for nine years.  

At this time Klausner and Brandstatter participate in their first film production -- the production of a remarkable landmark documentary film, Land of Promise, with original songs composed by Natan Alterman, which won first prize for documentary film at the Venice Biennale.  After the establishment of the State, they go on to use their personal resources to establish the first major film studio in Israel.  The ground was broken for the new building in 1949, and the film laboratory and sound stage were opened in 1952.  

The film also includes the personal side of Margot's life.  She had two children -- Miriam, the daughter that she had with Jacques, and Amos, the son that she had with Yehoshua.  Miriam's husband, Tzvi Spielman becomes the technical director of the Herzliyah Studios. 

 

Through the life of this remarkable woman, we are offered a glimpse at the history of Israeli theater (with vignettes from early Habimah productions) and milestones in Israeli filmmaking (with scenes from early productions such as Hill 24 Doesn't Answer).   In the 1960s, filmmaking in Israel becomes a bigger business, and the Studios were involved in the production of many important Israeli films such as The Boy Across the Street, I Love You Rosa, The Policeman, Sallah, and Peeping Toms, not to mention the thousands of documentary films, TV productions and newsreels that were processed in the studio labs.  

Margot Klausner was a woman with a vision.  In a country where cinema was not yet considered a cultural art, Klausner realized the importance of developing a film industry.  At the cornerstone-laying ceremony of the studios (July 3, 1949), the statement of goals included: It is the aim of the founders of these Studios to draw the attention of the nations towards our way of life in Israel, through the aid of movies, an art which has such a great influence in the world and reaches into all countries. 

The documentary film, Saga of a Photo (documentary, 80 minutes), is a fascinating look at the life of one woman, combining the personal with the national stories.  The film is available from Ruth Diskin Films.

Personal Documentary Filmmaking

My favorite documentary genre is "personal documentary" and Photonovela by Chen Shelach stands up to my expectations!  This is no dry documentary -- it is a personal story filled with skeletons in the closet.

Chen Shelach grew up on Kibbutz Mizrah and this is a compelling personal documentary about the story of his family. 

Shelach's  12-year-old daughter, Shir, is doing a family roots project for school, but she's more interested in "telenovelas" (hebrew for soap operas).  Little does she know that her father is hiding his own story from her and that a soap opera could be produced based on the story of his family.  

When he approaches his mother to talk about the story, she tells him, "The best is to live in the present."  She came as a Holocaust refugee to the kibbutz where she has lived her entire life.  Here everything is like a pressure cooker -- everyone knows everyone's business.    No wonder she prefers to dwell in the present.

The film asks the question -- is it better to tell children everything or to protect them by keeping secrets from them? 

 

Shelach's family seems to be a normal family - he and his wife and their 3 children -- living on the kibbutz.  Slowly the dramatic story unfolds.  This is the stuff that soaps are made of.  While researching her family's past, Shir learns about the kibbutz, the Holocaust, romance, and scandal -- up close and personal!

Photonovela (documentary, 52 minutes, 2013) is available from Go2Films.

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."

A Work in Progress

Sometimes I have the opportunity to view a documentary film as it is being produced, and I thought readers would appreciate the opportunity to see this film in progress. The name of the film is Road to Tantura and the filmmaker is a Palestinian/American woman named Hala Gabriel.  This is a film about the nakba – the Palestinian tragedy of 1948 and this is a personal documentary which combines the national with the personal.  The filmmaker tells her own family story and the story of the coastal village where they lived until they were forced to flee in 1948, all part of the national Palestinian history.    

Hala Gabriel was born in a refugee camp in Syria.  Later they made their way to Ann Arbor and today, she lives in Los Angeles.  She is a very articulate woman who is looking for her family roots.  She interviews family members living throughout the Palestinian diaspora and asks, why are we refugees?  How did that happen?  And she adds, I needed to know their story.  Using the personal angle, she has created an honest and authentic document which discusses that terrible day in May 1948 when the Haganah attacked their village and they were driven from their homes.  Some of the men were imprisoned and many were killed. 

The film is beautifully photographed and the personal angle makes it authentic and quite emotional.  The interview with her elderly aunt adds a touching aspect to the story – she recalls with a smile, floating on her back in the sea by their village when she was a teenager!  

The filmmaker travels to England to meet a Holocaust survivor, who was one of the Haganah soldiers who participated in the attack that day.  He tells the story and remembers the horror of driving the people from their homes and killing some of the men, all of which brought back memories of what happened to him as a child during the Holocaust.  He couldn't stand it and this is why he went to live abroad.

This is a story that needs to be told if we are ever going to understand the pain and suffering experienced by the Palestinians living in this land.

The clip that I watched was 20 minutes and it can be viewed on-line .

You can also read about the film and the filmmaker on the film's website

Blood Relation

In 1940, a 14-year-old Jewish girl named Pnina disappeared.  27 years later, she resurfaces, married with children, living in a refugee camp in Nablus.   The filmmaker learns about Pnina, her grandmother's sister, only after her grandmother passes away. 

Noa Ben Hagai tells how she found a box of letters, dating from the years immediately following the Six Day War.  The letters were written by Pnina who was trying to re-establish relations with her siblings, so many years after they had lost contact.  Now, more than 40 years later, the families re-connect via Shmulik and Salma, the children of two sisters.  Shmulik, a retired colonel in the Israeli army, is the son of Pnina's sister. Salma is one of Pnina's offspring. Shmulik and Salma live in very different worlds.

The film is told like a thriller – as the reasons are revealed concerning how and why Pnina disappeared so many years ago.  We also learn about the difficulties of family relations – Shmulik represents the occupation and Salma is a victim of it.   Also putting matters into historical context, the film tells the story of a refugee family from Jaffa who fled to the West Bank and their contemporary difficulties under Israeli occupation. Most importantly, the film is an honest and fascinating look at the complexities – the anguish, dependency, expectations and burdens -- that are created all as a result of the filmmaker's attempt to connect with her long lost family.

The film Blood Relation (documentary, 75 minutes, 2009), directed by Noa Ben Hagai, is available from Eden Productions.

The Flat by Arnon Goldfinger wins the IsraelFilm.blogspot Award

I've decided to award my own prize for the best Israeli film screened at the recent Jerusalem Film Festival.  And the award goes to: Arnon Goldfinger's The Flat which is a triumph of personal documentary filmmaking.

 

Goldfinger's grandparents, Gerda and Kurt Tuchler, lived in an apartment in Tel Aviv since they came to Palestine in the 1930s.  When Gerda passed away at the age of 98, her grandson comes equipped with a camera to document his family as they begin to unravel the contents of the apartment which was stuffed with classics of German literature, heavy European furniture, old carpets, photos, letters, ladies' handbags and dozens of pairs of gloves, old luggage, and more.

Together with the filmmaker and his mother, we embark on a journey that begins in the closets of his grandparent's apartment in Tel Aviv and takes us to Germany to learn about his family history, exposing secrets from the past that are not so easy to deal with.

At the Festival screening, Goldfinger talked about how the film, "which began as a little film about the clean-up of Grandma Gerda's flat", took over his life and took five "exhausting" years to complete.

We follow his research, and like a mystery, a riveting story unravels before us.  We learn about his grandparents, meet Gerda's closest friend, and look at photos and letters.  Slowly a painful story unravels of a couple who remained tied to their roots in Germany, never fully became comfortable in Israel, and continued to return to Germany to visit with their German friends, even after the war.  Why would German Jews renew their deep friendship with a German blue-blood, von Mildenstein, who was a member of the Nazi party already in the 1930s and a member of the S.S. during the war? 

The research takes us to Germany and we learn about Grandma Gerda's mother and meet the von Mildenstein family.  Slowly we realize that this is not only an Israeli story but also a German story.  We learn about the difficulties of the second and third generation in grappling with the past.  Are they looking at it honestly or are they still hiding from the truth?  The comparison with the second and third generation here in Israel is amazing.  Grandma Gerda never talked about her mother to her own daughter, and her own daughter never asked how she died during the war. 

At the screening, Goldfinger explained, "I knew from the beginning that this had to be a co-production with a German company, with people of my generation."  In the film, he goes to archives to learn more about von Mildenstein, who apparently was quite an important figure in Goebbels' ministry.  Goldfinger meets with a German professor who is a specialist in Holocaust studies and asks him why his grandfather, who fled from Germany and raised a family in Israel, would re-establish his friendship with a Nazi friend after the war.  The professor explains that, in order to help them confirm their German identity, there were Jews who, after the Holocaust, were unable to negate all of German culture and history and desperately needed to believe that there were some good Germans.  This explained the complex identity of his grandparents.  Even though they lived in Israel for most of their lives, they remained tied to their German roots forever.

The filmmaker acknowledges having "rediscovered his mother" through making this film and dedicated his last comments to his grandmother and grandfather, expressing his hope that they would like the film, at least parts of it.  "If not, please forgive me."

The Flat won an award for best director of a documentary film at the Jerusalem Film Festival last week.  The statement of the jury is as follows: "This is a beautifully composed film about uncomfortable truths and the challenge of confronting them. Mr. Goldfinger undertakes expert research and leads us through his findings in a way that is not only gentle and sensitive, but also compelling and creative."

The Flat is available from First Hand Films  and Ruth Diskin Films.

The filmmaker, Arnon Goldfinger, is an accomplished documentary filmmaker, best known for his award-winning The Komediant (1999) which documents the story of Pesach Burstein and his wife, Lillian Lux, who together fled Poland in 1939 and were known as a legendary music-dance-comedy-theater team. 

I Shot My Love

There have been two important Israeli feature filmmakers who grapple with their homosexuality on screen. Eytan's Fox's films (The Bubble, Yossi and Jagger, Song of the Siren, Walk on Water) have put gay men right in the center of the Israeli screen, and with great success! Amos Gutmann, who died tragically from AIDS in 1993, directed four feature films (Drifting, Bar 51, Himmo King of Jerusalem, Amazing Grace) all of which portray young people suffering from the limitations of a narrow-minded society and depict the director's own background, milieu and sensitivities.

More recently comes a documentary filmmaker, Tomer Heyman, who is willing to expose himself openly and honestly on the screen. His latest film, I Shot My Love, is a striking personal documentary look at family relationships and at his own developing relationship with a German man whom he meets when he travels to Berlin to present a film at the film festival.

This is a film about a relationship between two gay men – but it is about much more. It is also about love, illness, mother-son relationships, family bonds and reaching across the cultural divide in finding love.

A few years ago, Heyman directed a film Paper Dolls about drag queens which was screened at the Berlin Film Festival. His mother, whose parents fled from Berlin in 1936, came with him to Berlin to the festival, for the premiere. After the screening, Heyman went out to celebrate, and that's when he met Andreas.

Andreas is a complicated character, very blond, very good looking and charming. Although he is a German, he is not proud of it. Heyman is one of those filmmakers who has an obsession with shooting everything in his own personal life and the viewer is witness as their relationship grows and develops and deepens – Tomer behind the camera and Andreas on screen.

Tomer also focuses the camera on his articulate mother who is an accepting woman, open-minded, and tolerant of her son's choices vis-à-vis his lifestyle and his partner. She lived all her life in the village of Kfar Yedidya. There she met her husband and they brought up their five sons. After many years, she divorced, her sons moved away, and now she lives alone. She is a strong and compelling character.

The film is obviously about these two important people in the filmmaker's life, but it is also about issues of filmmaking itself. The style is "family cinema verité", exposing personal issues and emotions, as the viewer is offered a chance to watch things develop seemingly in real time. But this style also gets in the way sometimes, creating a barrier between the two men, and Andreas accuses Tomer of only talking to him when the camera is on and of hiding in safe territory behind the camera. Although he sees the camera as a barrier, it does not stop Andreas from revealing deep secrets from his own past.

I Shot My Love (70 minutes) is currently in theatrical release in Germany and is available from Heyman Brothers Films

Social Change

Incorporating both documentary and fiction, Doron Tsabari in his most recent film, Revolution 101, takes the viewer on an odyssey into his fight against corruption, while seeking reform at Israel TV Channel One. Similar to American crusading filmmaker Michael Moore, Tsabari puts himself into the center of the film, so it becomes his struggle and his obsession. Brilliantly, he utilizes the power of film and television in fighting against the deterioration of Israeli public television.

This is an insightful and powerfully critical film of the real Israel – the world of politics and corruption, the world of television broadcasting and the world of lawmakers. Together with his producer, Ori Inbar, Tsabari shoulders the burden of taking on the establishment in an effort to revolutionize the world of public broadcasting. Although the final outcome seems less important than the process itself, one can certainly conclude that social change is possible.

Tsabari's Jewish mother lends humor and charm to the serious nature of the subject matter – she is pushing her son to a different career, anything but filmmaking, one that would lead him to financial success. It is such an irony that one can hardly make a decent living as a filmmaker in Israel today.

Revolution 101 מדריך למהפכה (2010, 85 minutes) is available from Ruth Diskin Films.

Films of Yulie Cohen

My latest posting on the Lilith Magazine website is about the personal films of Yulie Cohen -- My Terrorist, Zion My Land, My Brother and My Israel -- all of which reflect issues of Israel of the last decade.

check it out!