The Delegation (המשלחת), directed by Asaf Saban, won the award for best screenplay at the 40th annual Jerusalem Film Festival, this past week.
According to the jury for Israeli feature films at the festival: “With
a very contradicted and difficult subject matter, this script finds a very
clever and special perspective which does not ignore the past of the topic, but
also finds a fresh answer for the new generation.”
About a class trip to Poland, this is a joyful film, full of warmth and good spirit. The story focuses on three good friends, 2 boys and a girl – Ido is popular with the girls, Frisch is hoping to have a first sexual experience, and Nitzan is the glue that holds them together. There is the fooling around in the hotel, some drinking, and also some serious moments.
It was nice to see that there is a
section of the story that deals with encounters with the local Polish population
(because most trips to Poland ignore the contemporary reality completely). When Frisch gets left behind as the bus
pulls out from a rest stop it leads to his meetings with the local people,
which adds an interesting perspective to the film.
Just as I was feeling that the film doesn’t deal enough with
memory and how the viewer, as the younger generation, fits into that picture, Nitzan,
who is a bit crazed by what she sees, steals a shoe from those masses of old
shoes in a scene that is very hard-hitting.
Nevertheless, I was left feeling a bit disappointed since it seemed to
me that the young people didn’t seem to understand or even care about why they went
on this journey to visit the death camps. Similarly, the filmmaker wasn’t adequately
able to express it. There just wasn’t enough grappling with Holocaust memory
and its implications for young Jews growing up in Israel today.
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