We bring up our sons to be heroes and then we send them off to war. A serious look at how one mother copes.

Another Israeli feature film that opened at the Jerusalem Film Festival this week --  

Oxygen, directed by Netalie Braun, is a hard-hitting and serious look at Israeli mothers and what they are forced to face when their sons go off to serve in the military. We bring up our sons to become soldiers and heroes, but worry frantically when they go to serve in wartime.

Netalie Braun is well-known for two previous major films -- 

• the award-winning documentary, The Hangman
• Metamorphosis, a film which combines documentary and video art.

Anat and her son Ido, who is a soldier in the Golani unit, have a very special relationship. They go swimming in the sea together and are planning a trip to India when he is discharged from the army.  Anat is the daughter of an army general. She teaches in an elementary school, where she teaches the children about the glory and heroism of the Six Day War.  She is obviously fully supportive of the Israel Defense Forces.

When her son is preparing to be part of a military ground incursion into Lebanon, something inside her snaps and she begins to panic that something will happen to her son.  We are all asked to make sacrifices, but Anat does not want to lose her son whom she loves more than anything. She sets out on a journey to the Lebanese border to find her son and bring him home. Not succeeding in that, she begins to hatch a plan in which she thinks she can save him.

There is a scene in the film in which Anat locks the front door of their apartment and hides the key so that Ido cannot leave the house and return to his unit. This scene reminded me of another Israeli film, Present Continuous (2012) directed by Aner Preminger, which was also about a woman in crisis who wants only to protect her children.

Oxygen provides a platform for a remarkable performance by Dana Ivgy as the mother, panicked about losing her son. Both the mother – from her crisis mindset – and the son – due to his asthma – seem to be in need of oxygen!  At this time of ongoing war, are the mothers of Israel capable of protecting their children?

Details about availability can be obtained from Aviv Ben Shlush, Producer at ZOA Films, aviv@zoafilms.com or Adi Bar Yosef, Producer at Baryo Productions, adibaryo@gmail.com

A new documentary film about military censorship

Another film that I viewed at the Jerusalem Film Festival, this past week, The Soldier’s Opinion, by Assaf Baniff, provides a shocking picture of how the Israeli army regularly violated the privacy of its soldiers, read their letters, analyzed them, and used the material in reports meant for the top brass.  Of course, all soldiers knew that their private letters were being opened and checked for security reasons by the military censor, but no one ever imagined that intimate and sensitive letters were being copied and shared with the highers-up on a regular basis. 

As the army was encouraging soldiers to write their inner secrets and feelings, the censor established entire units of censors. Each military unit had its own censors (many of whom were young women soldiers) who followed the soldiers in their unit personally. 

Using the reports written for the top military officers, the film covers about 50 years of subjects that were outlined and reported on.  It begins with testimony from the battlefield during the War of Independence, the plunder and looting of Arab homes that was prevalent, and the cruelty against the local Arab population, all of which is clearly reflected in many letters by soldiers in the file. But the hatred was not limited towards Arabs, there were extreme feelings and actions against Jews from Kurdistan and Morocco who reportedly felt that the Ashkenazi Jews acted arrogantly and treated them very badly for many years. Following the Six Day War, there were tons of letters reporting the many moral dilemmas which soldiers faced on a regular basis in ruling over the indigenous Palestinian population in the West Bank. This was followed by detailed letters which documented the traumas and deep feelings of soldiers who felt let down by their leadership, especially in the early weeks of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, which became known as “the earthquake” in Israeli society.

Using interviews with some of the women who served in the censorship units, the film portrays a feeling of voyeurism on the one hand, and on the other hand it reveals their feelings that they were reporting on the soldiers’ morale, and protecting them from dangers such as hazing, rancid food, sleep deprivation and sexual abuse. They also were required to report on the use of drugs and on incidents of homosexuality, both of which were handled swiftly by the office of Field Security.

Literally millions of letters were read and used in reports that were distributed to the heads of the IDF and to the political leadership of the state. Some of these reports supposedly greatly influenced Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

In 1998, the office of the censor was closed down because of the end of letter writing.  Today, the army monitors the soldiers’ posts on social media but those posts are meant to be public, and to be read by anyone interested. 

The Soldier’s Opinion (documentary, 55 minutes) is a deeply disturbing look at the almost unbelievable work of the military censor’s office from 1948 to 1998.  In today’s more open society, it is practically inconceivable that the IDF would be able to do such a thing anymore, without widespread public criticism. But, like many of the sins of the past—which were kept secret for a long time—this is part of our history. This courageous film helps us to come to grips with parts of our difficult past.