No Other Land (2024)

The documentary that could not get a U.S. distributer (it is a political hot potato) and few interviews (one of the directors is Palestinean) won the Best Documentary at this year's Oscars, as well as at many other award ceremonies. It is directed by the courageous Palestinian-Israeli filmmaking collective of Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor and it is compassionate, thoughtful, and even revolutionary. It is a devastating profile of the community of Masafer Yatta (a group of Palestinian villages in the West Bank constantly on the brink of destruction), the people living in perpetual uncertainty, and the way state violence consumes entire generations. This battle is mostly seen through the young eyes of Basel. A 28-year-old Palestinian activist, filmmaker and journalist, he has spent all of his life living in the shadow of annihilation as the documentary captures how the Israeli military routinely destroys their homes with bulldozers. In every shot where we see these convoys of destruction approaching on the horizon, there is a sense of grim familiarity and impending loss seen in the faces of the people we cut to. It’s a compassionately constructed film — it never looks away from the grimness.

The Bibi Files (2024)

This insightful documentary about Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been in power, on and off, for more than 17 years since 1996, is about the corruption charges that he has been facing. The parallels between his situation and the recently reelected American president are both startlingly clear and frightening that about half the population in both countries vote for a leader who is clearly a criminal who has the goal of enriching themselves at the expense of their country. The film consists of leaked interviews by the police with Netanyahu, his wife and his son, as well as the investigators’ interviews with Miriam Adelson and husband, Sheldon, the hotel and casino magnate who died in 2021. These longtime Netanyahu allies here sound, in admittedly brief clips, like they’re trying to distance themselves from Bibi and Sara. The video clips of police interrogations are interspersed with interviews by the filmmakers with journalists, politicians, and a childhood friend of the prime minister. The film makes a strong case that Netanyahu’s legal woes – the politician is charged with fraud, breach of trust and accepting bribes – mean that it’s very much in his interests to prolong Israel’s war on Gaza. Interviewees talk of wholesale quantities of champagne and cigars requested by Netanyahu from associates, with extravagant gifts of jewelry for his wife, Sara. Meanwhile, interrogation footage of her husband – a key component of the film – is eye-opening. He’s described elsewhere as an adept liar and the whole situation is a warning for other democracy’s that have autocratic leaders.

The Gatekeepers (2012)

This is a documentary from Israel which interviews six former heads of Shin Bet.  Here is a fair warning.  It is pretty terrifying, even if you have very neutral feelings about the Israeli-Palestinian situation, or the Middle East in general.  These guys talk in a very straight forward manner about just exactly what their job entailed and how they accomplished things.
Its first lesson is that in tracking and targeting terrorists, politicians want black-and-white answers, while these intelligence officers usually inhabit in the grey of doubt. If they strike, they might kill civilians. If they do not strike, they might leave Israel vulnerable to an assault. But, if they give their heads of state the incorrect answers, they risk widespread humiliation. Thus, public perception might be valued more than Palestinian lives. And the film offers a second lesson, which is that this godlike power to kill is unnatural. It corrupts all involved. 
However, the most chilling aspect, however, is the blunt commentary about the work itself. These men accept that national security has no morality.

Footnote (2012)

This is a movie that is surprising.  It focuses on a father and his son, both of whom are Talmudic scholars.  The father, Eliezer, is the sort of scholar who immerses himself in the smallest details, laroing tirelessly and pointing out the tiniest inconsistencies in various texts.  He believes that his approach is the only way to do scholarly activity and he has no patience with his son, Uriel, who writes sweeping summaries about Talmudic stories that are both academically praised and widely popular.  The father is harsh and unforgiving in his judgement of the son, while the son remains respectful of his father.

The two men are very different in their scholarship, but surprisingly similar in their character.  The son is a frequent interviewee on television and very socially able, while the father is almost autistic in his inability to manage the simplest of social interactions, even with his closest family members, but beyond that, they are very much alike, and the traits they share are not the ones that you might hope for.  In any case, the son is put into a very difficult situation, and in finding a way out of it, both he and his father learn about themselves and the other.  The movie has darkly comic moments, but prepare to be comtemplative rather than to laugh when you watch it.  The movie was an Academy Award nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, and honor that is richly deserved.

Fill the Void (2012)

This Israeli movie about a cloistered 18-year old girl named Shira in an Orthodox Hasidic community optimistically hoping to find love in an arranged marriage is claustrophobic, with shades of 'Das Boot', 'Fiddler on the Roof', and to a certain extent, 'The Godfather'.

The movie opens with Shira and her mother sureptitiously checking out prospective mates for Shira in supermarkets while her older sister Esther and Esther's handsome and loving husband Yochay await the the birth of their first child.  The ground rules are established early on in the movie--marriages are arranged but the girl has the right of refusal.  The cinematography uses close in shots and low key lighting to build suspense throughout, and the rooms of the houses are all small and filled with people.  The whole atmosphere raises suspense in a way that is at once Victorian and Mafiosa.

Then Ester dies, leaving a grief struck husband and a baby.  Tradition dictates a remarriage for him at one year, and he has an offer from a widow who he knew in childhood who now lives in Belgium.  Shira's mother cannot bear to have Esther's child leave, so she cooks up a plan to have Shira marry him.  Yochay is admittedly older than Shira, but he is also  gorgeous and successful, in contrast to the boys that Shira is considering as alternatives,  The catch is twofold--does Shira want the match, and that the rabbi won't let it go forward unless Shira can convince him that she wants the marriage.  For something as simple as who is going to marry Yochay, the movie is filled with suspense. 

5 Broken Cameras (2011)

Every story has two sides.  This documentary, which was one of the five finalists for the Academy Award  this year, tells the story of a Palestinian in the West Bank town of Bil'in.

The movie opens with the birth of Emad Burnat's fourth son.  He has bought a video camera to commemorate the event, and he begins by telling his audience how things have changed for Palestinians over the course of the lives of his four sons.  When he and his wife have their first child, there is hope for a better life for them--by the time their fourth son is born, they are confined to the West Bank, and watch as the Israelis encroach upon their land in the name of building a 'safety barrier' around a new settlement.

The settlers try to take more land, the Palestinians try to maintain their land.  The film is told from one point of view, but it is very hard to sympathize with the settlers.  It is just very painful to watch.  The Israeli soldiers are not portrayed as bad people, the Palestinians are definitely trying to fight back in a non-violent, overwhelm them with numbers sort of protest, but it is hard not to sympathize with the people who want to pick their olives and keep their arable land.

The name of the film comes from the number of cameras that it took to film it from start to finish.  The first camera is shot, at the same time that one of the protestors is shot as well.  You can see why Israel would not be particularly supportive of the film being made--it shows Palestinians as people that you can relate to.  They seem nice.  They appear to share values with us.  The movie quietly but emphatically argues, in it's own way, that a solution needs to be found, so that these people can raise their families in peace.  Now we know that not all Palestinians want peace, but this film shows that those people do exist.

Seven Minutes in Heaven (2008)

This is a movie whose plot slowly unwinds. It is not a tense unwinding, but rather one where we know the basics to begin with--Galia is a survivor or a suicide bomber explosion on a bus. Her fiance, Oren, is killed and she doesn't remember much of what happened. When Galia visits Itzik (Benjamin Jagendorf), a first responder at the bombing scene at his Gates of Heaven seminary she learns she was unconscious for seven minutes and was considered clinically dead. He shares a mystical tale about souls that rise up to heaven but are incomplete, telling her, "Our creator gives these souls a chance to observe the life they'll live if they choose to return." Although Galia scoffs, Itzik notes that a soul choosing to return might be able to change its destiny at the moment it reunites with the body. With her extensive burns slowly healing , Galia's memories of what happened that day are also slowly coming back. She begins to search in earnest for answers--and what she can remember--when she receives a necklace in the mail. She doesn't realize who the necklace belongs to and she doesn't know where it came from. She meets a kind man on the street, and she initially resists the soothing attentions of this new acquaintance, Boaz (Eldad Fribas). None-the-less, he is patient and the relationship deepens. He reveals some things to her, and her memory slwoly returns, culminating in the film's final chapterm, which puts a poignant spin on all that has come before. Very thoughtful movie that skirts around the edges of a society that lived with terrorism on a daily basis.

The Debt (2011)

The Debt is a drama-thriller based on an Israeli film of the same name. It focuses mainly on the baggage that three Nazi hunters carry with them for 30 years before a turn of events puts into question their loyalty to Israel, each other, and the greater good. Helen Mirren stars as Rachel, the protagonist, who is seen throughout the film reflecting on her past as a Mossad (The National Intelligence Agency of Israel) agent during her team’s mission to capture a notorious Nazi doctor who performed atrocious experiments in concentration camps. Rachel is the only woman in the three-person team, and her emotions scream through the camera—her uncertainty and the tension she feels are everywhere. The team includes David (Sam Worthington, Ciarán Hinds plays him in the present-day) whose sorrowful expressions are hard to understand until we learn his whole family perished in the Holocaust. Marton Csokas is Stefan (Tom Wilkinson plays the older character), the cocky leader of the group who is very hard to empathize with as the film drives into complexity. The setting mostly goes back and forth between East Berlin (1965) and Israel (1997). Most of the events that occur are seen through Rachel’s eyes, played by Jessica Chastain (who I have seen twice before this month, in Tree of Life and The Help). The Mossad agents are easy to imagine as real individuals. Although they are determined to fulfill their mission, you see their anxiety everywhere and feel the past of the Holocaust haunting their memories. And although the film is not really a psychological thriller, the Nazi doctor (played by Jesper Christensen who captures the immense cruelty of the doctor so subtly) gets into all of their heads in a bad bad way. Very effective. This is one of those rare movies that will seize you and keep you guessing as the plot unfolds, slowly unearthing the meaning behind the title.

Live and Become (2005)

We are in the midst of the worst African famine in my lifetime, and this movie demonstrates that there have been bad times before now. Set in the mid-1980's, the movie opens with a boy, Solomon, dying in the arms of his mother Hana in a Sudanese refugee camp, having walked away from the fmaine in Ethiopia. Hana agrees to smuggle another boy, a Christian boy, out to Israel under a Jewish guise. Hana tells him that he can never reveal this secret, and he lives a Jewish life in Israel, being adopted after Hana dies early on.
The movie is about his secret, the racism he is subjected to, and the suspicion that he has pretended to be Jewish to get a better life--which is actually true. The politics of race and religion are complicated in Israel, and 'Schlomo' (as he is known) grows into an angry man, longing for the other who gave him up, and having a hard time committing to the woman who loves him and is having their child. Israel is a country of immigrants, and this movie highlights some of the difficulties faced by an entire people who have left their homes, many experiencing significant trauma, and who are tied together by religion.

Adam Resurrected (2008)

This is a Holocaust movie in the vein of 'The Counterfeiters', but with follow up--the later ends when the concentration camp is liberated, whereas this movie moves between pre-war Germany, a concentration camp during the war, and then the 1950's and 60's.
So here is the premise: how do you survive survivors guilt, especially when you have debased yourself in exchange for your life. Well, it isn't easy, and immediately after WWII, there was not much in the way of treatment available. No antipsychotics, few anxiolytics, and no antidepressants. We really hadn't even managed good studies on psychotherapy or the value of light in exercise as it pertains to mood. So extremely traumatized, fragile people, regardless of their baseline brilliance, were sequestered together, far away from the rest of the world. Best not to see them, was the prevailing philosophy.
Adam (played convincingly by Jeff Goldblum) was a circus performer before the war. He was a clown--which means that he was clever and talented, but maybe not a man with a depth of psychological resources. He survives the was by becoming the camp commandant's second dog, living on all fours, competing with the other dog for food and watching his fellow prisoners march off to the gas chambers day by day. The commandant (portrayed pitch perfect by Willem Dafoe) teases him that he can save his family by doing as he is told, but that isn't true. Adam is left with financial resources at the end of the war but he is unable to manage. He is unpredictable and often mean. He swivels between the brink of snaity and out and out madness with dizzying speed, and almost without purpose. This film is not about telling a coherent story so much as it is about depicting the sequellae of atrocities. Which it does without violence--which is remrakable, chilling, and effective. Holocaust movies continue to tell different sides of a hoffifying story and this is an unusual entry into that genre.

Jaffa (2009)

This is Romeo and Juliet, Israeli-style, with a great script and cast, and as is usual in a Film Movement film, spectacular cinematography.
Here's the story. Mali's father Reuven owns a garage in Jaffa, the 'old town' south of Tel Aviv that is still a cross-cultural mix of Arabs and Jews. But the Jews tend to the the employers and the Arabs the employees, as is the case with Reuven and Hassan, and then Hassan's son, Toufik. Reuvin treats father and son respectfully, but there is that relationship, none-the-less. Reuvin's son Meir is another story--he is work avoidant, quick to blame others when his work is not done, and racist. He treats the Arabs working in his father's garage like second class citizens.
Why is this a problem--well, first, Meir's sister Mali is in love with Toufik, and this has been going on for quite some time. They have kept their relationship a secret up til now, but Mali is pregnant and they plan to leave Israel to marry. All is going along according to this doomed plan until Meir and Toufik get into a fight that Meir started, but Toufik ends by decking Meir, and inadvertantly killing him.
There is nothing like untimely death to change a mediocre man into a martyr, and Meir's family wastes no time doing so. Mali is caught in the middle, and largely chooses family over love, but not quite. Her unhappiness is palpable throughout the back end of the movie, and it ends on a bittersweet note.
The movie is tragic, the story of these two lovers left to us as a paradigm for how untenable easy solutions are in Israel today.

Laila's Birthday

This is a wonderful movie with a small scope. We follow Abu Laila around in his taxi for one day in the West Bank. It is his daughter Laila's birthday and he is tasked with picking up the cake and getting her a gift, and off he goes. The movie does not try to show how terrible things are for the Palestinians, at least not in a catastrophic way. Rather, the movie shows how the daily grind gets people worn down. Things are very hard to accomplish. Streets close randomly. The cars break down and the fixes are more makeshift than factory-direct. Political jobs are in constant flux and there is little int he way of forward progess. Bombs fall. No one knows who is responsible--terrorists or Israeli's, it seems that people think either is as likely as the other. Trips to the hospital get worked into the schedule. The quiet chaos of everyday life is depicted with warmth and resignation. This community has no security. No real hope for change. Both sides are too entrenched in what separates them rather than what can unite them, and the moment for trust and compromise happened more than a generation ago. And yet life goes on. Birthdays happen, people go to work, children go to school, and the conditions slowly deteriorate. It is a gentle movie about why ongoing war is so destructive.

For My Father

I showed this film to my confirmation class last night. We are on the topic of god, but this movie probably fits more squarely in the neighborhood of parent-child relationships and obligations. Tarek is Palestinian. He was a largely apolitical Arab who played soccer in Nazareth but lived in the West Bank. So in order to practice and play, he and his father needed to cross the armed border on a regular basis. As suicide bombings increased, this became increasingly difficult to do, and so paradoxically, in the Arab community, terrorists had a bigger and better hold on Palestinians than ever beofre. It was their way or the highway. And Tarek's father became a persona non grata for not bowing to that way of thinking. The movie opens with Tarek en route to Tel Aviv to become a suicide bomber and redeem his father.

But there is a catch--his detonator misfires and he needs to replace it. On Friday afternoon. Katz, the owner of a small repair shop, does not have the exact replacement, and since it is almost Shabbat, it will be Sunday before he can get it. So Tarek is forced to spend time within the community and gets to know them--which makes it increasingly difficult for him to contemplate killing them. But the thing that he really misses that the Katz' teach him is that parents do not recover from the death of their children. This act, which he does in the name of his father, will end his father's life as he knows it. Tarek is caught in the middle of two worlds and doesn't have time to find a good way out.

Lemon Tree

When I was just a lad of ten, my father said to me,
"Come here and take a lesson from the lovely lemon tree."
"Don't put your faith in love, my boy", my father said to me,
"I fear you'll find that love is like the lovely lemon tree."
Lemon tree very pretty and the lemon flower is sweet
But the fruit of the poor lemon is impossible to eat.
The opening of this movie, with a Peter, Paul, and Mary song sung in a plaintiff voice, is a haunting beginning to a haunting film. The movie tells a small story in a beautiful and balanced way that shines a light on the bigger Israeli-Palestinian problem. There is a plea for women to rule nations for a more peaceful world embedded within this film.

I have been slowly but surely falling in love with Israeli films--the intensity of life there, where man has lived in conflict for several thousand years, is sympathetically portrayed time and time again. Yet even in that atmosphere, this is a memorable movie. The movie is directed by Eran Riklis, whose 2004 movie, “The Syrian Bride,” explored Israeli-Arab border tensions in a deeply moving way--non-judgmental and yet the conclusion was clear. This is also a wrenching, richly layered feminist allegory as well as a geopolitical one. Salma Zidane (Hiam Abbass) is a Palestinian woman whose history has put her in the wrong place at the wrong time--Navon, the Israeli Defense minister movies in next door and her life is changed forever. The movie is summarized nicely in the New York Times review (to go to link, click on title), and the details of the story are well told. But the mournfulness of women, who live with what powerful men have wrought (and perpetuate) is part of the story that is not so much told as etched out in the faces of Salma and Navon's wife, Mira. I would rather that they be in charge of solving the dilemma than the men who feel it is their job to do so. The futility, the short range answers that complicate long term solutions, and the inevitability of people perpetually doing the wrong thing for the right reasons sadly plays out to the predictable ending. And you will not easily forget it.