Sad days for Israeli cinema
Reflections from the Toronto and New York film festivals
Eric Goldman writes and teaches about Jewish cinema. He is president of Ergo Media, a distributor of Jewish, Yiddish and Israeli film.
If you love movies, there is nothing like a film festival, and New York and Toronto host two of the best.
The Toronto International Film Festival has more than 20 venues, all close to each other, while the New York Film Festival uses four theaters. Clearly there are more choices available in Toronto, but New York holds its own.
Most years, if you want to attend one of these festivals, you have to schedule around the High Holidays. That’s what happened this year in New York.
There often used to be as many as five or six new Israeli films and several movies with Jewish content opening in Toronto. But last year there were just a few Jewish-content movies and not even one Israeli film, and this year there were only two Israeli movies screened at TIFF.
I asked Tchelet Semel, the head of the film and television division at Israel’s consulate in New York, why Israel didn’t work harder to get films screened in festivals this year. The answer, she said, is that the country’s focus had moved from supporting Israeli films to promoting the distribution of its television shows. Israel’s government also has made it clear that it does not want to fund films that touch on controversial internal issues. Instead, it wants to support only those films that make Israel look good. Given that situation — with would-be filmmakers getting little to no backing from the consulate and with funding sources that often only offer support with strings attached — we are seeing fewer exemplary movies made in Israel.
Then there is the question of how Israel’s precarious place in the world right now affects the choices of festival programmers.
As a result of all these pressures, it seems that more than 20 years of exceptional Israeli filmmaking, which garnered all kinds of international accolades, along with film festival screenings around the world, sadly seems to have come to an end.
And this all predated October 7, 2023. The situation is much worse now.
The one Israeli feature narrative film that premiered in Toronto this year was “Hemda” — “Bliss”— a heartwarming look at an elderly couple who are forced to go back to working after they have retired because their son has gotten himself in financial peril. Superb acting by Sasson Gabay, probably Israel’s most prolific actor today, as the husband, and Assi Levy as his wife, makes this a warm and endearing movie about the importance of family. In the film, writer/director Shemi Zarhin, whose work includes “Aviva My Love” and “Bonjour Monsieur Shlomi,” stays away from politics, internal issues, and societal scrutiny in telling this poignant story.
But that did not keep six people carrying Palestinian flags from marching on stage and chanting their slogans. The six seemed content to stay on stage, delaying the screening for nearly 15 minutes, until the audience drowned them out, chanting “Bring Them Home!” That’s today’s situation.
Alexis Bloom’s “The Bibi Files” was a late addition to the festival. The documentary draws from video recordings of the police questioning of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; his wife, Sara; philanthropist Miriam Adelson; and Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan. The interrogation was related to the corruption charges that have been leveled against Bibi and Sara. We watch Bibi’s awkward responses as he hears the Adelson and Milchan interviews that provide damning information about him. And listen as he tells the interrogator “I don’t remember!” Just how Ms. Bloom acquired this provocative footage is unknown, but it presents a most injurious peek at the prime minister, who is scheduled back in court on December 2.
Though only these two Israeli films were featured in Toronto, three Palestinian movies were included in the festival’s offerings. I had no interest in Palestinian filmmaking until October 7. Gaza-born Palestinian director Rashid Masharawi elicited 22 short films from Gaza residents, released as a two-hour movie called “From Ground Zero,” in an effort to tell their story. Cinematically, the compilation film did not hold up, but the festival organizers felt some sort of obligation to screen the work.
I found it disgraceful when the programmer in charge at the festival introduced the film by mentioning “Israel’s genocide.” So far, the director of the Toronto Film Festival has not responded to my inquiry about a festival representative using this language.
Another Palestinian film at TIFF, which I chose not to see, was Mahdi Fleifel’s thriller “To a Land Unknown.” It’s about Palestinian refugees who are stuck in limbo in Greece.
So, there were lots of Palestinian films, but only one Israeli narrative and a documentary that derided its prime minister.
As is generally the case, there were no Israeli films screened at the New York Film Festival. Actually, I can think of only one Israeli film included in the festival in this last quarter of a century. I must point out, though, that Film at Lincoln Center, the organization that sponsors the NYFF, also co-sponsors the New York Jewish Film Festival with the Jewish Museum every January. Many Israeli films are included in that festival. Still, I would have liked to have seen an Israeli film presented in this one.
But a Palestinian documentary, “No Other Land,” was shown in both New York and Toronto. You might call the film an Israeli-Palestinian co-production — two of its four directors are Israeli Jews and the other two are Palestinian Muslims. The filmmakers chose to document efforts by the Israel Defense Forces over the years to evict residents from the small mountain village of Masafer Yatta in the southern West Bank where one of the directors, Basel Adra, grew up.
Together with Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, Mr. Adra filmed the army’s coercive behavior as it cleared the area in order to establish a tank training facility. According to the filmmakers, residents of this place, where generations of their families have lived, are being uprooted unfairly. Last year, Israel’s Supreme Court ruled to allow the eviction, but all the details presented remain unclear, and as we know, documentaries can distort truth and fact.
What is clear, though, as recorded on film by the directors, is that a group of Jewish settlers did come into the Palestinian community to harass the residents. They wore head coverings reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan and they carried guns. When one of the Palestinian residents came out to greet them and talk things through, one of the settlers simply raised his rifle and shot him.
The scene was unspeakable and puts such an ugly face on the State of Israel, at a time when the country has so few friends. Don’t we have enough issues, as Israel fights what are existential wars on so many fronts? To make it all the more horrendous, an IDF soldier just stood there alongside the settlers and did nothing!
This film is being screened around the world.
“The Brutalist,” a 3 1/2-hour film directed by Brady Corbet, who co-wrote it, and starring Adrian Brody and Felicity Jones, also was screened at both festivals. Brody, who garnered an Oscar for “The Pianist,” is brilliant as László Tóth, a Hungarian Jewish architect who survives the Shoah and makes his way to America. Cinematically, it’s both challenging and creative, as Corbet pushes a variety of avant-garde and Russian constructivist elements in framing the opening minutes and occasional scenes throughout.
What does define it, however, is a strong Jewish purpose, which I largely failed to grasp through most of the film. What did the announcement of the United Nations November 1947 partition plan for Jewish and Arab states have to do with the film’s story? Then we hear Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion reading Israel’s new Declaration of Independence in May 1948. Why? Was Corbet just trying to establish the historic period?
What finally became clear, at least to me, was that Brady and co-writer Mona Fastvold were laying the groundwork for an evaluation of American Jewry, with a strong sense of ambivalence about its future.
This hit me only late in the film, after Tóth’s wife and niece join him in America and he finally begins to gain notice as a brilliant architect. Just as Tóth seems to be fulfilling the American dream, it becomes more and more clear, at least to his niece, then to his wife, that Tóth, who is, after all, a Jew, is both admired and detested — because he is a Jew. First his niece picks up and moves to Israel, then the wife tells him that she too can see her future only there.
It may be a Zionist fable, but it’s worth seeing!
“The Brutalist” was the only Jewish-content film screened in New York. It was shown four times — and very oddly scheduled, given its subject matter. The first showing ended just as Kol Nidrei began, the second two were on Yom Kippur, and the fourth started a little more than an hour after the fast day ended. I was able to see it because I rushed out of shul in Teaneck as soon as the shofar blasts marked the end of Neilah, grabbed a bite on the run, and drove into Manhattan much too quickly.
Why was the film scheduled this way? Why did the festival planners exhibit no sensitivity? A Jew might want to watch the only “Jewish” movie being shown at a film festival in a city that is one-quarter Jewish! Was this hostile or unintentional? Someone should have known better!
Eric Goldman of Teaneck is adjunct professor of cinema at Yeshiva University and host of “Jewish Cinematheque” on the Jewish Broadcasting Service. He is writing a book on Israeli cinema.
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