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 is 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.