Cultural Heroes

Alex in Wonderland, by Ori Sivan, is a creative and thought-provoking documentary portrait of the Israeli photographer and photojournalist, Alex Levac, who was awarded the Israel Prize for photography in 2005.  

 Levac is a remarkable photographer, capturing people on the street who reflect the contemporary Israeli reality.  The film shows his work with contrasts -- enabling the viewer to see things in many diverse and interesting ways.  It also gives us insight into the man -- his curiosity, his bashfulness, and his attraction to the margins of society.  We are treated to photos from his years in Brazil, and a shocking  view of life as seen in an entire series of portraits of people at Tel Aviv's Carmel Market.

Levac became well-known in Israel with his photo of one of the terrorists who hijacked Bus 300, as he was being led away from the bus.  This was an incident in 1984 in which two terrorists who had hijacked an Israeli public bus were executed by Israeli security service personnel (Shin Bet).  The story was later told that they had been killed in the battle to gain control of the bus.  Levac's photograph of the terrorist, however, proved otherwise and caused an uproar in Israeli society.

The film Alex in Wonderland (53 minutes) is available from Ruth Diskin Films and is part of a series entitled Cultural Heroes.  Other films in this series which have previously been reviewed on this blog are:

• ·         Gitai - In search of his Carmel by Ran Tal about the filmmaker, Amos Gitai
• ·         A Stranger in Paris by Nir Bergman about actress and filmmaker, Ronit Elkabetz

Ronit Elkabetz

Ronit Elkabetz is an award-winning actress and film director who works both in Israel and France. Born in 1964 to a religious Moroccan family, she grew up in Beersheba (until the age of 12) and Kiryat Yam (north of Haifa). Her first role on screen was as the Lilith character in Dan Wachsmann's The Appointed and she appeared again as a woman with special powers when she played the mentally challenged sister in Shmuel Hasfari's Sh'chur, a role that won her the Israeli Academy Award (Ophir Prize) for Best Actress. She won the same award for her role in two of Israel's most acclaimed films of the last decade: Dover Kosashvilli's Late Marriage and Eran Kolirin's The Band's Visit.

Nir Bergmann's documentary film, A Stranger in Paris, provides a window into the world of this award-winning, exotic and impressive diva and captures the mystery of such a passionate woman. It is wonderful to see behind the scenes in her life and to learn how she became so successful in the acting world in Paris -- from her first acting internship to the brave step she took in putting on a one-woman theatrical show, and finally to her major roles. We learn about her work on stage, her working on her shooting schedule, her talking behind the scenes sharing her thoughts, fears and professional considerations. We meet her in her interactions with her French colleagues and in her work on the two films that she directed together with her brother, Shlomi (To Take a Wife and Seven Days).

A major scene in the film documents Ronit Elkabetz' work with French filmmaker, Brigitte Sy, who directed her in her autobiographical film, Les Main Libres (Free Hands), about a woman who is making a film at a prison where she falls in love with an inmate. At the film's premiere at the Jerusalem Cinematheque just a few months ago, Elkabetz shared with the audience details about her close and intense working relationship with the filmmaker, as she was acting in a role which represented the filmmaker's own story. This relationship is portrayed in no less an intense way in this documentary.

Elkabetz talks, with much emotion, about her childhood, about her fears and distress as a child who was different, and was worried about being accepted as different. Filmmaker Nir Bergman asks her to talk about the myth of her taking the character home with her and she explains that she draws intuition, emotion and identity from all of the parts that she has played and they stay with her. She also explains that she became a filmmaker in order to tell a story, her own story, from her own perspective, the way she sees it and that she writes the script from her subconscious, from suppressed memories.

An extraordinary film about an extraordinary personality, A Stranger in Paris is made by Nir Bergman, acclaimed Israeli feature film director of Broken Wings and the more recent, Intimate Grammar. The film is part of the series entitled Culture Heroes and is available from Ruth Diskin Films.

Amos Gitai

Filmmaker Amos Gitai (born in 1950) served in the Yom Kippur War of 1973 as a reserve soldier, at which time his helicopter was shot down. In 1977 he began directing documentary films for Israel Television. After his film House was censored by the television authorities, and when his subsequent film Field Diary met with much criticism in Israel, Gitai moved abroad. He trained as an architect at the University of California at Berkeley (Ph.D., 1986) and lived in Paris for many years. He returned to live in Israel in 1993. Gitai's films deal with themes of exile, emigration, and political issues relevant to the current reality in Israel.

In addition, his films explore the boundaries of a critical view from within. His film Berlin-Jerusalem is a shattering view of the Zionist dream, and Kippur is a graphic antiwar film (based on some of his own experiences during the Yom Kippur War). His trilogy Devarim, Day after Day and Kadosh takes place in Haifa, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem and explores, with a critical eye, societal issues in each of those cities.

A prolific and controversial filmmaker, Gitai is one of the Israeli directors who have received accolades worldwide including prizes at Cannes, the distinction of Cavalier of the Arts from the Minister of Culture of France (1999) and retrospectives of his work have been organized in Europe and at the MOMA in New York City. In Israel, however, his films are criticized for being disjointed, non-linear and critical of Israel. Many say this is due to the jealousy of his colleagues due to his critical success on the international level and the resentment of the critics to his having lived and worked abroad. In Israel, he was the recipient of an achievement award from the Jerusalem Film Festival (2002).

A recent documentary film entitled Gitai – In Search of his Carmel by Ran Tal (2009), was shot while Gitai was researching locations and preparing for his recent feature film, Carmel (which premiered in 2009). This documentary is compelling in that it provides the viewer with insight into Gitai's unique way of creating a film -- his artistic process which is always dynamic and the script which is always developing.

We meet Gitai face-to-face and he talks about his films – 25 documentaries and 16 feature films. He discusses the earlier films that have an emphasis on theme and the later films, such as Free Zone, that experiment with the traditional definitions of narrative and form. Gitai talks about people on the move all around the world, and the fact that his parents were immigrants and how the subject of emigration and immigration fascinates him. We watch as he is creating a scene of his mother, reading from her letters to him from London when he was 10 years-old, talking about how she does not feel at home in any of the places that she has lived – not Vienna, Berlin, London or Paris. This theme of people on the move is a theme that can be seen not only in Israeli films but also in American and European films of recent years.

Gitai – In Search of his Carmel is part of a series of documentary films about "Culture Heroes" and is available from Ruth Diskin Films.

For those interested in reading more about Amos Gitai, a new book has become available -- Amos Gitai: Exile and Atonement by Ray Privett, which can be downloaded free from the website of Cinema Purgatorio.