Israeli Feature films compete at the Jerusalem Film Festival

The Jerusalem Film Festival has begun and it is very exciting to see so many people gathered together to enjoy culture from Israel and from all around the world.  The opening event took place in Sultan’s Pool, where 6,000 viewers watched the new Israeli film, Tell Me Everything (previously reviewed on this blog).

There are six films competing in the prestigious Haggiag Competition for Best Israeli feature film. The first film shown was What is to Come שעתיד לבוא   , directed by Ruthy Pribar, which tells a story about a woman whose husband commits suicide and she has to face the trauma and pick up the pieces of her life.

Yehudit and her husband live in a modest house on a moshav.  After her husband commits suicide and leaves her with enormous debts, she leaves her home and takes a bus to Eilat to escape.  She gets a job cleaning hotel rooms and rents an apartment in a poor neighborhood.  After a few days, a family of African refugees shows up and claims that this is their apartment. They end up living together, and eventually, Yehudit becomes attached to the pregnant mother and her 5-year-old son. At the same time, Yehudit has an affair with the manager of the hotel where she works. The story is surprisingly lacking in complexity and under-developed, with too much left unsaid. At the end, there is a hint that she gets her life back together.  But it’s unclear how and we are left wondering how she could leave the little African boy behind!

The second feature film shown in this category was Where To? לאן a debut film, directed by Assaf Machnes.  The director spoke at the premiere screening at the Jerusalem Film Festival last night, and welcomed both of his grandmothers to the screening.   He apologized for not providing them with great-grandchildren, but he is presenting this film instead!  The film was produced with assistance from the Gesher Multi-cultural Film Fund and I am proud to be affiliated with that fund.

The story takes place in Berlin, almost entirely shot within the taxicab of Hassan (played by Ihab Salami), a middle-aged Palestinian Uber driver.  During the night-time hours, Hassan drives partygoers from one nightlife venue to another through the streets of Berlin.

One day, he picks up Amir, a young Israeli and they strike up a conversation about where they are from.  Hassan is from Jenin and Amir is from Nahalal. Not so far away from each other. Over a period of months, Hassan ends up driving Amir a few times, and a bit of a friendship develops.  Hassan helps Amir by driving him when he is very drunk and very lost.  Amir helps Hassan by talking about the importance of real love.

Although the film is not a comedy per se, it has a lot of humor and charm. The funniest scene takes place when Hassan is talking to his cousin on speaker phone in Arabic when an older Israeli couple gets in the cab.  The cousin says, I hear they are speaking in Hebrew. Let’s have a bit of fun.  I will throw in words like Jihad and Al-Aksa. And they get a laugh at playing on the paranoia of the Israeli couple.

Hassan is a charming fellow. We get a feeling for his life and the issues that are important to him as the film develops over several months.  But we are a little frustrated because so much between Amir and Hassan is left unsaid. Perhaps the importance and beauty of the story lie in what is unsaid. On the other hand, there could have been some more dialogue about some of the critical issues facing them as an Israeli and a Palestinian, such as why are they estranged from their homes and yet why do they both yearn to return home?

This film only gives hints about the major issues which divide Israelis and Palestinians. Instead, it is an attempt to humanize them by showing that relationships can be formed on their common humanity.

 

Issues of Identity

A.K.A. Nadia by Tova Ascher is a hard-hitting and effective Israeli feature film which premiered at the Jerusalem Film Festival this past week.  It is a complex narrative statement about issues of identity, racism and intolerance.  Can we shed our past or our identity the way we shed clothes at the end of the day?  

Nadia is a Palestinian teenage girl whose boyfriend, Namer, is being sent to London (apparently for terrorist activity).  She decides to marry him secretly and follow him to London, where they live separately, due to the dangers of his work.  One day when she is out, her landlady is picked up by the police and Nadia is afraid to return home.  Unable to locate her boyfriend, she eventually finds a job in a laundry, saves enough money and goes to buy a forged passport so that she can return home to Palestine to her mother.  She ends up buying a real passport which belonged to a girl who, together with her entire family, was killed in a terrible crash.  The only problem -- her new identity is Jewish Israeli.

Fast forward 20 years -- Nadia, now called Maya, is living in Jerusalem, married to a lawyer who is involved in the right-wing government, mother to two teenagers, and works as the director of a dance company.  She is passing as Jewish and tries to keep away from political discussions.  For all intents and purposes, we see a typical Israeli family.  When Maya's past comes back to haunt her we realize that one cannot live forever hiding one's past.  

In a very difficult and tumultuous scene, she goes to see her husband in his office, sitting across the desk from him, as if she is a client coming to seek legal advice, and begs for them to live "as if nothing has changed".  But her husband is  no longer capable of seeing her as the woman he loves.  His eyes see a stranger, an Arab woman. One might have thought that we could transcend such definitions. 

 

A.K.A. Nadia is a superb film with complexity of plot and narrative tension.  An Israeli-U.K. co-production, the film is available from Go2Films. 

Lipstikka by Jonathan Sagall

A new film by Jonathan Sagall opened this week in Israel. 

As an actor, Jonathan Sagall has appeared in a number of international films, including Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List and George Roy Hill's Little Drummer Girl.  He is well known to Israeli audiences for his role as a teenager in Boaz Davidson's Lemon Popsicle and its sequel, Going Steady, and he won an award for best actor for his role in Amos Gutmann's Drifting.  In more recent years he has turned to directing -- his directorial debut, Urban Feel, won prizes at Valencia, Varna and Haifa. 

Sagall's new film, Lipstikka, is about two Palestinian women.  Although the film is clearly critical of Israeli soldiers, this is not the focus of the film.  The story opens with two Palestinian girls living in Ramallah – Inam and Lara -- one is Christian and one is Muslim.  In order to celebrate Lara's birthday, they decide to cross the checkpoint into Jerusalem, where they have a terrible encounter with brutal and macho Israeli soldiers who manipulate and violently abuse them.

Years later, Lara (stunningly played by Clara Khoury) lives in a beautiful home in London with her husband and her 7-year-old son.  Her life is bourgeois and dull, her husband is unfaithful and she drinks too much.    The film begins and ends with her saying: "I could have had a different life," which is terribly sad.  One day, her old friend Inam shows up at the door -- she was the wild one when they were teenagers years ago.  Today, they have a difficult and ambivalent relationship, with many flashbacks to their growing up together in Ramallah.

This is a complex and difficult film, about themes of sexuality, emotional disintegration, suicide, rape, and a lesbian relationship. 

A Work in Progress

Sometimes I have the opportunity to view a documentary film as it is being produced, and I thought readers would appreciate the opportunity to see this film in progress. The name of the film is Road to Tantura and the filmmaker is a Palestinian/American woman named Hala Gabriel.  This is a film about the nakba – the Palestinian tragedy of 1948 and this is a personal documentary which combines the national with the personal.  The filmmaker tells her own family story and the story of the coastal village where they lived until they were forced to flee in 1948, all part of the national Palestinian history.    

Hala Gabriel was born in a refugee camp in Syria.  Later they made their way to Ann Arbor and today, she lives in Los Angeles.  She is a very articulate woman who is looking for her family roots.  She interviews family members living throughout the Palestinian diaspora and asks, why are we refugees?  How did that happen?  And she adds, I needed to know their story.  Using the personal angle, she has created an honest and authentic document which discusses that terrible day in May 1948 when the Haganah attacked their village and they were driven from their homes.  Some of the men were imprisoned and many were killed. 

The film is beautifully photographed and the personal angle makes it authentic and quite emotional.  The interview with her elderly aunt adds a touching aspect to the story – she recalls with a smile, floating on her back in the sea by their village when she was a teenager!  

The filmmaker travels to England to meet a Holocaust survivor, who was one of the Haganah soldiers who participated in the attack that day.  He tells the story and remembers the horror of driving the people from their homes and killing some of the men, all of which brought back memories of what happened to him as a child during the Holocaust.  He couldn't stand it and this is why he went to live abroad.

This is a story that needs to be told if we are ever going to understand the pain and suffering experienced by the Palestinians living in this land.

The clip that I watched was 20 minutes and it can be viewed on-line .

You can also read about the film and the filmmaker on the film's website

Rebuilding your Life in a New Land

Yesterday at the Jerusalem Film Festival, I went to see a Belgian film, Illegal (directed by Olivier Masset-Depasse) about a woman from Russia who is treated badly by the local police because she is an illegal worker. This was a compelling story about a mother and her teenage son and the trials that they undergo in trying to become accepted in their new surroundings. For some reason, this is a subject that has been really bothering me in recent years – as it becomes more and more of a human issue all over Europe, the United States, and certainly here in Israel.

The Israeli features of recent years that deal with foreign workers or visitors and the influence that they have had on us (all of which have been reviewed on this blog) include:

Foreign Sister (Dan Wolman)
James' Journey to Jerusalem (Ra'anan Alexandrowicz)
Noodle (Ayelet Menachemi)
Janem Janem (Haim Bouzaglo)

and documentaries:
The Tale of Nicolai and the Law of Return (David Ofek)
Children by Remote Control (Nachum Landau)

A Palestinian film that deals with this subject of migration and trying to rebuild your life in a new country is My Father from Haifa by Palestinian-Danish filmmaker, Omar Shargawi. The film, which was screened this week at the Jerusalem Film Festival, is a particularly sensitive and personal look at a father-son relationship and at their journey to the childhood home of the filmmaker's father.

Omar Shargawi, won an award at the Rotterdam Film Festival (2008) with his debut film, a feature about the Arab community in Copenhagen, Go in Peace, Jamil.

Another film about Palestinians who have found their place abroad is Amreeka, directed by Cherien Dabis, about a mother and son who emigrate to Illinois to be with relatives. The film is about finding a place to call home, where we feel comfortable, where we can have friends, where our children will find happiness and educational opportunity.