A Family Comedy

The Big League (ליגה של גדולים), directed by Yaniv Berman, is a feel-good, family comedy for those who enjoy soccer! 

This week, during the war against Iran and against Hizbollah, I went with my grandkids to see a family movie.  The movie theaters are mostly underground at Yes Planet in Jerusalem, so they are considered relatively safe.  We all enjoyed ourselves and came out with a smile on our faces.  Don’t expect too much depth from this one!

Our hero, played by Yisrael Attias (who we know from the TV hit, HaShababnikim), is a professional soccer coach who has a problem with anger management.  After an incident in which he attacks the referee, he is sent as punishment to the periphery of the country where he is meant to coach a junior high team.

Of course, he is antagonistic to the whole enterprise and, at first, refuses to even attempt to make this work.  But eventually the kids, the team spirit, one particular woman, and the smalltown lifestyle of this northern town, all contribute to his becoming committed to his newfound role.

At a time when Hizbollah rockets and Iranian missiles are falling in the north of Israel, this film, partially about the lure of living in the Galilee, proved to be especially poignant.

The Big League is produced by Transfax and distributed by United King.

Highway 65 Premieres at the Jerusalem Film Festival

Highway 65 (כביש הסרגל) directed by Maya Dreifuss, is a captivating and forceful thriller.  It is a story of how one police detective, conscientious and persistent, can make a difference.  

Dafna is a police detective working in Afula in the Galilee.  She’s a quirky and compelling character, 41 years old, single and, as is so typical in Israel, she is often asked why she doesn’t have any children.  She’s quite assertive in her detecting manner, asking questions right to the point, not beating around the bush.  You might say she has a big mouth and often puts her foot in it!  This is what got her transferred from her police detective position in Tel Aviv and sent to Afula (a real demotion) where she is now working on petty crimes.

When an Arab teen is found with a cellphone that belongs to a local woman named Orly, Dafna is tasked with trying to locate her.   Orly, however, cannot be found.  She is a military widow and she has been living with her in-laws who are very important people in the local business scene.  The question becomes why hasn’t anyone reported her missing?  Dafna is bothered by the apparent indifference to Orly’s fate all around her.  All of this comes together to make this a case which should perhaps be handled with kid gloves.  But Dafna rushes ahead, haunted by how she identifies with the apparent victim, suspecting and butting heads with everyone.

At the Jerusalem Film Festival this week, Highway 65 won an Honorable Mention in the category of best Israeli feature film. According to the judges: “We were impressed by the courage it took, especially in this country, to turn a bereaved mother into a murderer. Sometimes, the very, non-glamorous local resonates and this film with its excellent cast, is both very local and universal.”

Highway 65 is distributed by MK2 or Go2Films. 

The Clash between Tradition and Modernity

Lady Kul el-Arab, directed by Ibtisam Salh Mara'ana is the story of one young woman's pursuit of her dreams.

Duah Fares is a Druze high school girl, from the town of Ramma in the Galilee. Her dream is to win the "Lady of the Arabs" local beauty pageant. She is a beautiful teenager with a lot of charm and her parents support her in her dream. After receiving training in modeling, make-up, style, she successfully reaches the stage of being a finalist in the Lady Kul el-Arab contest.

But then Duah expands her horizons, changes her name to Angolina and decides that she wants to enter the Israeli beauty contest, which is a larger, national pageant, and would give her greater opportunities and exposure if she were to win. There are some difficulties, however. The Israeli pageant would force her to wear revealing clothes and to appear in public wearing a bathing suit. In addition, she is told that she must choose between the two pageants.

As a result of the publicity, the family receives death threats and the religious leaders of the Druze community condemn her participation in such an event. Duah says, "They can't deny me my dream."

View an on-line interview by Rosie Walunas with the filmmaker, Ibtisam Ma'arana, who grew up in a traditional family in Faradeis (an Israeli Arab town on the coast, south of Haifa). Ibtisam Ma'arana is committed "to show the reality, if it's good reality or worse reality. To make films for me is to show my society, a kind of mirror, so that we can look on ourselves and to try maybe to make a change."

Another film by the same filmmaker is Three Times Divorced, about a Bedouin woman named Khitam who is fighting for custody of her children.

The film Lady Kul el-Arab is available from Ruth Diskin Films

"Cobwebs" by Zvia Keren

I recently came across a compelling, well-documented and extremely hard-hitting film about the human side of the 2nd Lebanon War. This is a film that asks a lot of tough questions. It's not about our troops who didn't get food or water, not about the cabinet decision-making, and not about the massive destruction in southern Lebanon. Rather, this film is a look at how people in the northern Galilee were coping, what issues they were discussing, and how did all this link to previous terrorist attacks in the area.

During August 2006, while the war was raging in the north, documentary filmmaker Zvia Keren journeyed from place to place, interviewing and filming. While missiles were falling, fires blazing, and frightened people were running to shelters, she and her crew continued on their way. The film is narrated in the first person by Keren herself, who was born and raised on a moshav on the Lebanese border.

Using archival footage, she tells the story of the Ma'alot massacre in 1974 -- 22 school children were murdered by a group of terrorists who infiltrated from Lebanon. How could it be that in those days no one fled Ma'alot "under fire", and today, everyone is fleeing the Galilee? Has something happened to the Israeli psyche? What would happen if bombs fell in Tel Aviv, would we keep running, leaving the entire country behind?

The human suffering during the 2nd Lebanon War and the suffering of the Ma'alot attack are deftly mixed together with another story – the story of a 1979 terrorist attack in the northern Galilee. This is where the film becomes personal and particularly compelling. A PLO terrorist band landed in Israel by boat, broke into a home in Nahariyah and abducted Zvia Keren's brother-in-law, Danny Haran (age 28) and his daughter Meital. Meanwhile, Danny's wife Smadar was hiding, holding her hand over her younger daughter Yael's mouth so that she wouldn't make a sound. Not able to breathe, little Yael died. The terrorists took Danny and Meital to the nearby beach and brutally killed them there. One terrorist, Samir Kuntar, was taken prisoner and later was tried in Israel for this shockingly brutal attack. In 2006, after the Hizbullah captured two Israeli soldiers, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, Nasrallah demanded an exchange for Samir Kuntar, who had been sitting in an Israeli prison ever since. But Israel wouldn't trade a terrorist with blood on his hands and wouldn't trade for soldiers who had been abducted. This would create a terrible precedent. And a war broke out.

Raising questions about the past
Keren wonders if we are too humane. Perhaps we should have shot Kuntar right there on the beach, that night back in 1979? She talks with Smadar Haran, the mother of Meital and Yael, both of whom died that night. Till this day, Smadar sleeps in her clothes at night for fear that terrorists will invade her home. She talks with Nina, Danny Haran's mother, and asks if we had traded Samir Kuntar, could we have prevented all this death and destruction? Did he deserve to be traded? In any event, could it have saved lives?

Just last month, on July 16, 2008, in a prisoner swap, Israel traded the terrorist, Samir Kuntar, alive and well, in exchange for the dead bodies of Ehud (Udi) Goldwasser and Eldad Regev. Smadar Haran came to the funerals of Goldwasser and Regev and hugged Karnit Goldwasser, Udi's young widow. How do we justify that exchange after all the death and dying? How many mistakes in judgment have we made?

The title of the film refers to Nasrallah's declaration that Israel was weak as a cobweb. Zvia Keren has a different interpretation – she concludes that we are stuck in a web and the web has become so much more complex than it ever was before.
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Cobwebs, directed by Micha Livne, produced and narrated by Zvia Keren (63 min., 2007) is available for rental and purchase from Ruth Diskin at http://www.ruthfilms.com/