In Israel a new film consciousness emerges, uneasily

By Steven Zeitchik

June 10, 2016 8:30 AM PT

The Israeli director Eran Kolirin shook up the 2007 Cannes Film Festival with “The Band’s Visit,” a movie that earned some of the best reviews of the year by examining the intercultural lives of everyday Egyptians and Israelis. The film was so intercultural, in fact, that its mix of Arabic, Hebrew and English languages disqualified it, controversially, from foreign-language consideration at the Oscars.

At Cannes this year, Kolirin was back with a new and equally complex movie. Unlike “The Band’s Visit,” however, the film, “Beyond the Mountains and Hills,” was interested less in bordertown commingling than in an ordinary Israeli family making a series of questionable choices.

The family, the Greenbaums, suffers the tension between conscience and self-justification in its private behavior –”We’re not bad people,” patriarch David (Alon Pdut) says, after some moves that might suggest otherwise. It’s a clear metaphor for a country that should, the film argues, undertake a more ardent self-reckoning.

“For years I had a lot of trouble with Israeli-ness,” Kolirin said in an interview. “I loved and hated it. It’s a place I come from and it’s a horrible place, the only place that speaks your language and a place of contradictions. I wanted to look at all of that. This is a country,” he added, speaking generally, “that refuses to look in the mirror.”

Kolirin’s creative transition is representative of a larger cinematic shift. For years, a large portion of the country’s film culture – one of the most prolific in the Middle East – was focused on a host of external realities. Movies such as “Lebanon,” “Ajami” and “Waltz With Bashir” examined Israel’s tensions with neighboring countries and the occupied Palestinian territories.

Many Israeli productions still focus on those realms —and, as the deadly shooting attacks in Tel Aviv on Wednesday underscored, terrorism and politics remain timely subjects. But just as often the nation’s cinema is turning the lens on itself. Whether it’s a generational evolution, a fatigue with the headlines or other factors, there’s a noticeable uptick in films about these topics, which include immigration, women’s rights, minority assimilation and inter-generational conflict.

At Cannes this year that reached a crescendo of sorts, with “Beyond the Mountains” and another film, the Israeli-American Asaph Polonsky’s “One Week and a Day,” a black comedy about a family in a Tel Aviv suburb enduring the aftermath of a personal tragedy. There was also a picture by the publicly financed Israel Film Fund, Maha Haj’s “Personal Affairs,” that looked specifically at an extended Palestinian family.

The movies signal a kind of cinematic awakening, a sign of a country that has been more willing to focus on social issues and its own policies, often critically.

“From the many submissions we get, the projects that deal with political situations and the main ‘conflict’ are not that many anymore,” said Katriel Schory, the longtime head of the Israel Film Fund. “We get a lot more on social issues--religious-secular
subjects, minorities, immigrants. The main issues in this country are about solidarity and tribalism, and a lot of the scripts are about that,” he added.

A recent study by the newspaper Ha’aretz found that in the past five years the number of films focused on domestic affairs has risen to nearly 50%. Though it’s the political situation that grabs the most headlines, as with many cultures, the questions that preoccupy inhabitants run deeper and wider.

Paradoxically, thoiugh, the flowering comes at a moment of more scrutiny from some of the gatekeepers who make Israeli film possible, raising long-term doubts about the medium’s ability to keep posing these questions.

“Beyond the Mountains” is the most self-critical, as the Greenbaums become a kind of symbol of a country at a crossroads — particularly with David, whose inability to find his footing after leaving a long career in the army casts a skeptical eye on the central place of the military in Israeli civilian life.

“One Week and a Day,” which won a prize in the Critics Week section at Cannes, centers on a middle-aged couple in the wake of the death, from illness, of their 25-year-old son. The film centers on the more businesslike approach taken by wife Vicky (Evgenia Dodina), and devil-may-care flippancy of husband Eyal (Shai Avivi), and is interested in human instead of national psychology.

“I wanted to see how two people deal with this difficult situation, their different approaches to what happens when, after a made-up reality, they have to face the real one,” Polonsky told The Times.

The increase in the number and quality of films in Israel can be traced to the passage of the so-called “cinema law” a little more than 15 years ago. The legislation ensured that a self-sustained Israeli film culture, with an annual disbursement fund – now about $20 million -- financing these movies. More than 200 pictures have resulted, including the influential family drama “Late Marriage” and, more recently, genre movies such as the horror tale “Big Bad Wolves,” a breakout in 2013.

But some of that business is also now under threat, many filmmakers say. The creative community has lately been at odds with Miri Regev, the polarizing minister of culture and sport, who was appointed to the job after the sweeping victory of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party last year.

The official, known for her outspoken right-wing views, has said that she’d like to limit the number of movies she thinks “speak against” the state and instead focus on films that center on a “Zionist, Israeli, Jewish and societal” viewpoint. Last year, Regev also revoked funding for the Jerusalem Film Festival after the gathering wanted to screen a documentary about Yigal Amir, the assassin of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

At Cannes this year, Regev opened Israel’s first-ever pavilion, as the festival calls its tented gathering places for various national film businesses. It was a pointed riposte to the filmmaker-driven Israel Film Fund, led by its longtime head Katriel Schory, whose stand has long been set up in the Cannes market.

The creative community has expressed concern with Regev’s actions, saying that criticism is part of the role of filmmakers and comes with the free-speech spirit of a democracy. “It worries me very much,” Kolirin said. “The main thing for me is personal films and personal points of view and of course [the ministry] tries to suppress that.”

The government says it has neither the interest nor ability to influence the tenor of films.

“The minister has said she does not like movies against the state but she can’t force anyone to change,” said Etti Cohen, head of the film desk at the Ministry of Culture, in an interview at the Israel Pavilion at Cannes, as she cited the independent status of the Israel Film Fund, a non-governmental organization.

The pavilion was simply a way of advertising the nation’s film output and location advantages, she said. A pluralistic mind set, she added, still prevailed.

“There are many more films in Israel than there used to be about Arabs, about the ultra-Orthodox, about immigrants. Every [Israeli viewer] sees something they can identify with‎,” Cohen said.

For his part, Schory has said that, though he took some solace in the fact that the current budget for the film fund was assured through 2018, he had reason to fear for the sovereignty of filmmakers beyond and even before that.

“We are very, very concerned. We see the government interfering with broadcasters an the board of directors there. They think all of us in the arts are too independent, and they don’t like it,” he said.

While he has received calls from lobbyists and special-interests groups, he said he has never heard a complaint from the ministry of a member of parliament. “There’s no concrete action, only talk,” he noted. “But,” he added, “you never know when talk can turn into action. At the moment we don’t feel it, but I don’t know what next year will bring, or next month.”

Filmmakers say they can only continue working. Movies about a variety of social topics, such as Asaf Korman’s mental-illness drama “Next to Her,” or Efrat Corem’s class-themed “Ben Zaken,” have recently come out to some acclaim. Creators say they hope to continue examining issues in Israeli society without interference.

That can be easier said than done.

While Kolirin maintains that he was aiming a skeptical lens at Israeli society, some saw matters differently. Variety’s reviewer called out Kolirin for letting Israel off the hook, saying “the story’s imbalance distracts from the very issues it addresses.”

The filmmaker took a harsh line toward that assessment. “These are people who think they understand Israeli society because they read a piece in the New Yorker,” the director said acidly, noting that some of the reactions “appalled” him. “Of course the film is being ironic, being critical,” he added. “These are people who don’t understand the reality of Israel because they’ve never lived there.” Casting a critical eye, it turns out, is even harder than it looks.

@ZeitchikLAT

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