Heightened states of passion
August 2012
Over the last decade, a cinematic renaissance has occurred in Israel.
A range of accomplished directors now sit alongside internationally recognised auteurs like Amos Gitai and Nir Bergman, creating works that contest clichéd notions of their country. Artistic Director of the AICE Israeli Film Festival, Katriel Schory, attributes this to a philosophical shift on the part of the Israeli Film Fund of which he has been Director since 1999. The major funding body values relevance, projects that are ‘embedded in our reality in this very turbulent and complex society and reality that we live in’.
Familiar tropes are present – military intrusions (Lipstikka, Room 514), Mediterranean beaches (Dolphin Boy) and preoccupations with the Holocaust (My Australia, The Love Lost Diaries) – but mostly it is a destabilising gaze that is directed back upon the nation. There are forays into tales of people from backgrounds and countries as diverse as Poland, Ethiopia, Israeli Arabs, Palestinians, Moroccans.
Dolphin Boy, a searing documentary, moves beyond its study of trauma and dolphin therapy. Morad, a seventeen-year-old full of promise, is beaten almost to the point of death resulting in a severe dissociative condition. The film is ostensibly not about the event itself but both the grave possibilities for coming undone that such an event might lead to and the potential agency situated in a disavowal of violence. The hero of this modern Greek tragedy is Morad’s father, who enthrals us with his intensity of emotion and conviction; his pride and masculinity uncompromised by his unashamed love for his son. Some scenes, awash with water from the sea, contain the shimmering beauty of a super-8 home movie. Just as the idea of a complete recovery is impossible, no glib ending is offered.
In the ironically titled My Australia, child actor Jakub Wroblewski seems to channel the delicious scampishness of Toto from Cinema Paradiso, albeit with a twist. For Tadek and his brother are members of a neo-Nazi gang in 1960s Poland. After they are imprisoned for a violent incident, their mother is impelled to emigrate and tells Tadek that they are bound for Australia, repository of his fantasies. The truth is less palatable; she is a Jewish Holocaust survivor and the move is to Israel, a country uncomfortably full of Jews.
Other films to look out for are the acclaimed Restoration, Dusk and The Other Son in a program, co-produced by Palace Cinemas, that is deeply reflective of the heightened states of passion which characterise Israeli lives.
Israeli Film Festival 2012
August 28 – September 9
Palace Como and Brighton Bay
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