Searching for Holocaust Memory

The Delegation (המשלחת), directed by Asaf Saban, won the award for best screenplay at the 40^th 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.

 

 

New Film by Matan Yair - A Room of His Own

 A Room of His Own, directed and written by Matan Yair, premiered at the Jerusalem Film Festival last night. It is a wonderful coming-of-age film about a teenager learning to handle the expectations of others and the difficulties of maturing.  This is Matan Yair’s third feature film.  His debut film was Scaffolding, an award-winning film which was reviewed on this blog.

Similar to Scaffolding, this film is also about a 17-year-old high school senior who has trouble understanding how to curb his impulsiveness and his enthusiasm for sharing what he is thinking, even if it is not terribly socially polite or correct. 

In A Room of His Own, Uri is an awkward and socially inept teenager, who has only one friend, and has a unique perspective on the world. Since his parents are going through a separation, his mother has moved into his bedroom.  They hug and share tender moments each night before going to sleep.  In his pre-army interview, Uri mentions that he shares a room with his mother, and suddenly he realizes that perhaps this is something that should have been kept secret.

The film touches on many subjects such as dealing with divorce, awakening sexuality, and how to handle his relationship with his sister who is in the army and only comes home on the weekends. Much of the film, however, is about Uri’s desire for a relationship with his disappearing and clueless father, and, on the other hand, his strong relationship with the sports teacher at his school.  It is also about the crude way that comments based on the Holocaust, on memory, on the terror of the Nazis, and about Goebbels and Goring, creep into his conversation.

According to the remarks by the filmmaker at the screening last night, this film has autobiographical details and is about “the period that my mother and my siblings tried to keep our heads above water.” His mother, weary and suffering from the separation from the father, is portrayed in a wonderful way, as a woman working hard to move ahead in her job, and as a loving figure to her son and her daughter.

This is not a film with a lot of action.  Rather, Matan Yair provides us with insight into the high school years which can be so difficult for young people. He is a talented filmmaker, with a subtlety and preciseness as he casts his gaze on a particuilar period or situation. 

TV series about Israeli high school students now available on Chai-Flicks

 The Lesson (Hebrew title: Sha’at Efes or Zero Hour) created by Deakla Keydar, is an award-winning 6-part drama series, broadcast last year on Israel TV-KAN, the public broadcasting station.  According to Variety, the series is now available for streaming on Chai-Flicks.  It can also be seen on Netflix in Israel (hebrew only). 

In April 2022, the series won the prize for Best Series at Cannes International Series Festival. The series also won an Israeli Academy award, in 2023, for Best Israeli TV Drama Series.

Based on a true incident, The Lesson is a hard-hitting series about a teenage girl at a good high school in Kfar Saba (northeast of Tel Aviv) and her political argument with her leftwing civics teacher, which completely spirals out of control. Lianne is quite obese and therefore suffering from a lack of self-esteem.  The civics teacher is literally stunned by how the many racist students in the school line up against him and his teaching.  In fact, the situation snowballs until the anti-Arab feeling is loudly expressed as the students are demonstrating to close the local public pool to “outsiders”.

This is a series which relates to contemporary issues that we are confronting within Israeli society, especially during this period of the right-wing government.  These are realistic issues for young people to learn about.

 

A New TV Series about the High School Trips to Poland

Memory Forest, directed by Roman Shumunov, is a new prizewinning TV series, made for Israel TV Kan. The series tells the story of a journey to Poland of a group of Israeli high school students. 

The story is about 2 sets of friends – Shani and Lilush from Carmiel and Kobi and Omri from Herzliyah.  There is plenty of flirting between the girls and boys, and it seems that Shani is having trouble connecting to the subject matter and Omri seems to be a real jerk at the beginning.  But things even out, as we get to know them, and as their anxieties become clear.  Episode #1 is about Warsaw. Episode #2 takes place at Treblinka. Episode no. 3 is at Lublin and episode no. 4 is in the forest. 

I sit on the committee of the Film and Media Collaborative (made up of representatives of three funds: Gesher, Maimonides, and AviChai) which funded this series.  Honestly, we were all a bit apprehensive that the program might turn out to be too much of a teaching unit and also a bit formulaic.  I was thrilled to have a chance to preview the entire series this week and it was great!  The script, the acting, the historical teaching moments all were superb and I am proud to have been a small part of this project!

This series offers a mix between telling the story of the Shoah, on the one hand, and the experience as seen through the eyes of the young people, on the other.  There are many moving scenes, including the one at Treblinka, where we learn about the 17,000 stones in memory of the children and adults who were murdered there – every single day.  There is the nationalistic argument as seen through the expression of one boy who reacts with anger, saying that having ceremonies isn’t the only way to commemorate.  There are the moments when they are trying desperately to understand the meaning of the trip, the meaning of being survivors, the importance of how this trip reflects on their Jewishness, all so that the victims will not have died in vain.  There is the teenage girl who doesn’t want to spend any money in Poland because everyone there is anti-semitic but she is surprised to learn that Rivka, their accompanying survivor, wants to go take advantage of the shopping. We watch as these young people grow and slowly begin to understand so much about their own place within this story of memory.

Memory Forest is a TV series made up of 4 episodes, each approximately 30 minutes.