A Gem of a Film About Boys at Risk in Tel Aviv

Children of Nobody, directed by Erez Tadmor, just opened in Israeli cinemas.  I rushed to see it because the filmmaker, Erez Tadmor, is a well-known award-winning director/scriptwriter, known for A Matter of Size (co-directed with Sharon Maymon, 2009) and Strangers (co-directed with Guy Nattiv, 2007, and previously reviewed on this blog).

The film is a surprising gem.  Why surprising?  Because I had clearly unfounded expectations from a film about youth at risk in Tel Aviv.  I expected it to be gritty and filled with violence.  But I was happily surprised to discover a story of charm and grace.

Margalit (played by Tikki Dayan) runs a shelter for boys at risk in the Neve Tzedek area of south Tel Aviv.  The shelter is built on a plot of land which developers are chomping at the bit to get their hands on.  The gentrification of the old neighborhood becomes an issue in the film, and we see how it impacts on the poor and especially the boys, who have nowhere else to call home.

Although Margalit is a loving figure and runs the place like a home, she is worried about the welfare of her more than a dozen boys, and is strict when necessary.  The boys range in age from Benny, who is still wetting his bed, to Yossi, who is turning 18, and hoping to be drafted soon. Their stories are sad stories, including Roman’s – he says his mother put out cigarettes on his arm and he describes it as a railroad track. As a result, he has become a petty thief, which adds tension to the film, every time the police show up to look for him.

Margalit is assisted in running the shelter by Jacky, the handyman, who himself grew up there and has never left.  One day Jacky discovers that the place is in danger of closing, and he decides to take radical steps to prevent that from happening.  He is assisted in his shenanigans, unwittingly, by a lovely French social worker and an aging lawyer, both responsible in different ways, for the shelter. 

The film actually focuses on Jacky, who isn’t the sharpest tool in the box, but turns out to be an intriguing and compelling character.  I highly recommend this film! 

Keeping the Memory Alive

 Yom HaShoah always comes a week after Pesach – it’s April 8 this year.  So, I thought I would take this opportunity to review a Shoah documentary that I had the occasion to see just lately. It’s not a new film, but it’s particularly touching and it makes an important statement about Holocaust education, which is all too often just ceremonial and lacking in meaning.

 The Strength to Tell, directed by Noam Demsky, tells the story of a drama therapy program for youth at risk in Jerusalem.  These youngsters know very little about the Shoah, and have no personal relationship to it.  As part of a workshop run by the Jerusalem theater group, HaMartef, they are given the opportunity to meet with five Holocaust survivors, all of whom testified at the Eichmann Trial, which took place in Jerusalem in 1961.  After they view each survivor’s testimony, they have small group meetings with him, and then they do theater exercises to develop their own expression towards the stories that the survivors shared with them. 

One story is told by Avraham Avriel – his mother and brother were killed at an open ravine in the Ukraine and he succeeded in running away, haunted until this day, by the memories of his mother and brother who he left behind in the pit.  We watch the footage of his testimony at the Eichmann Trial and then we see the touching encounter with the youth participating in the program.

Yosef Kleinman talks about his experiences at Auschwitz.  Yehuda Bacon talks about the difficulty he had because you become insensitive to the evil taking place around you.  Nahum Hoch was locked inside the gas chamber with all the tension and the crying.  And then, suddenly, they took them out to do another selectia.  He is convinced that he was brought back to tell the story of what happened there. 

 We watch as the young actors are amazingly impacted by the people they meet.  They take the material they hear, struggle to build their own relationship to the Shoah and create a theatrical story around it. 

 The Strength to Tell (documentary, 2013, 50 minutes) is a moving and innovative film which shows how the Shoah can still be meaningful to young people, even so many years after it occurred.  The film can be obtained directly from the director, Noam Demsky, at demskynoam@gmail.com.