Three 2025 documentary nominees for the 98th Academy Awards

I have seen only one of the five Academy Award nominees for Documentary Feature Film, Cutting through Rocks, so I don’t know how it compares to the other four, and cannot speculate about the winner.  All I can say is that this vérité documentary, shot in Iran, hits the ball off the park.

The challenges of the observational documentary are phenomenally overcome in Cutting through Rocks, filmed over eight years by the Iranian-born U.S.-based married couple of Mohammadreza Eyni and Sara Khaki. It is not just that they stumbled upon a remarkable woman in a remote town in northwest Iran, or the success they had with building her story into a coherent narrative about a quietly defiant woman in a conservative Muslim society.  It is that they understood how to make this documentary work also as an absorbing example of ethnographic filmmaking. 
 

Gaining the full trust of the protagonist Sara Shahverdi, her nine siblings, extended family and the villagers (400 of whom she brought to life as a midwife), the directors capture the dynamics of a traditional society based on patriarchal structures, consolidated over centuries, including early marriage, barebones education, no property rights for women, etc. All this comes brilliantly to the forefront in a courthouse sequence where the legal system is the sharia law, and in the scenes where Sara, an avid motorcycle rider, teaches young girls how to do it. Religion and law are cemented together, and these Iranian filmmakers impeccably show how women are the subject -  if I may - of systemic discrimination
 

Viewing Cutting through Rocks, one has the impression of being in the rural world of Abbas Kiarostami, the children’s universe of Majid Majidi, and even in Marjane Satrapi’s black-and-white drawings of faceless women clad in chadors in her graphic novel Persepolis.  The filmmakers share with Satrapi the perspective of Iranians now living abroad, the West-meets-East gaze in a loop. A fascinating documentary about a people, a place and a culture, it goes beyond straightforward advocacy by choosing to reveal rather than condemn.
 
In light of the horrific repression unleashed by the Iranian theocratic regime these past weeks, the question comes urgently to the forefront about the conditions of production of a documentary, like this, similar to those of fiction films made in Iran since 1979; some of them may be shown abroad, in festival or theatrical releases, like A Separation (2011), The Fig of the Sacred Fig (2024), and the work of Jafar Panahi, but are heavily censored in the country, with various forms of punishment meted to their directors.  The documentary lists its production company Gandom Film as based in Iran.  In the political and cultural climate of this nation, a documentary like this, challenging the sharia law, the patriarchy and the subjugation of women, is unimaginable to this reviewer.  
 

Clocking at 95 minutes, Cutting through Rocks (the title is a knockout metaphor connecting the opening scene to the film’s subject) is the first feature documentary of Mohammadreza Eyni and Sara Khaki, filmmakers who have participated in prestigious workshops like Sundance and Tribeca; they received funding from U.S. and international sources, including Chicken & Eggs Film, IDFA’s Bertha Fund and the Doha Institute in Qatar.  It won the award for best international documentary at Sundance this year and completed the festival run before its theatrical release on November 21 in New York.
 
I have also seen two of the five nominees for documentary shorts: All the Empty Rooms and Children No More: “Were and Are Gone”.  Compelling for different reasons, the subject is children whose lives have been cut short by violence and war. They are an emotional cross to the jaw. 
 

The strategy of the 33-minute All the Empty Rooms is to push statistics, headlines and locations about school shootings (Columbine, Uvalde, Saugus) into life: the audience is compelled to contemplate – in its deep etymological meaning - the unfathomable horror of innocent lives snuffed by gun violence in school shootings in the U.S.
 
Over seven years, veteran television documentary producer and director Joshua Sheftel followed CBS News reporter Steve Hartman and photographer Lou Bopp in their mission to record the bedrooms of eight children and teenagers killed in school shootings.
 

A producer of “feel good” stories, and after covering school shootings since 1997, Hartman felt the urge to shift his uplifting angle, putting the focus on children.  In this immaculately crafted documentary, the goal is to restore, as he notes, his and the audience’s empathy. One astute strategy to accomplish this is to avoid mentioning “gun”, “gun control”, and provide minimal context – only year and school. There is emotional restraint but immense warmth in the way parents and siblings talk to Hartman about their loved ones, while the photographer captures with delicacy the echoes of these children through toes, clothing, furniture and whimsical objects.  The score by Alex Somers and the sound design by Peter Albrechtsen help create a climate of sorrow and loss.
 

The documentary’s goal and climax are encapsulated in the reporter’s final reflection: “I wish that we could transport all Americans to stand in one of those bedrooms for just a few minutes. We’d be a different America.”  
 
Independently financed, All the Empty Rooms is connected to the photo series Hartman and Bopp put together and showed on “CBS News Sunday Morning” and “60 Minutes” in 2024.  The film is streaming on Netflix since December 1.
 

Children No More: “Were and Are Gone” focuses on the work of Israeli peace activists organizing vigils in Tel Aviv for the Palestinian children killed in the Gaza war.  Like All the Empty Rooms, this 36-minute Israeli documentary goes for the emotional jugular of the audience with photos of innocents trampled by violence, but it is explicit in its anti-Jewish impulse. The paradox, of course, is that this pro-Palestinian advocacy unfolds in the only democracy in the Middle East and was directed and produced by Israelis. Imagine the possibility of an Iranian documentary, sanctioned by the mullahs, about the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody in 2022, and the ensuing crushed protest “Woman, Life, Freedom”.
 
Since March of 2025, a group of leftist activists gather in silence in public spaces, holding photos of these young Palestinian casualties of war when they were alive, with an inscription about their age and date of death. The data, trustingly noted by one of the organizers, is corroborated - quotes - by the Hamas ministry of health.  The deaths are de facto laid only on the Israeli military, without any Hamas responsibility, and described as an Israeli strategy of genocide.
 

As an observational documentary, following the travails of these activists, it works as an effective tool to awaken the humanity of the viewers and enlist their sympathy. Understandably, no sane person is for war and destruction.  And the photos are heartbreaking.
 
But there is more than the referential meaning in this well-structured narrative, since Children No More cannot be extricated from its political circumstances. Established Israeli director Hilla Medalia astutely provides some counterpoint as context. She films the reactions of passersby, who call out the protestors for eliding who started the war, and forgetting about the compatriots held hostage.  It is not Israel, they argue, who slaughter, murder and preach genocide.  The documentary does not show any thoughtful engagement with views contrary to its point-of-view.
 
As a result of politics or conviction, the film ends up adopting the narrative of the enemies of the Jewish nation. In this sense, Children No More financed outside of public Israeli film organizations, functions as a work of political propaganda. It becomes part of the larger conversation – as were the German and American documentaries of the 1930s and World War II – about the power of film to persuade.
 
 
 

Documentary treasures: Four years of Israeli non-fiction films - Part 4: 2021

For the past several years I have been a pre-screener of documentaries features and shorts for the Social Impact Media Awards. SIMA is an online platform founded in 2012 by Daniela Kon, to curate, promote and distribute documentaries (https://simastudios.org).

 
What has stood out every year is the number and quality of documentaries made in Israel, produced with private and public funding. It is a thriving scene that deserves ample distribution and scholarly assessment.  Below I discuss a number of excellent titles, made between 2021 and 2024. I have included some of them in the Senses of Cinema World Poll of 2023 and 2024.  
I have organized them in five main categories, according to subject matter: 
1. The Jewish experience in Europe in the 1940s: The Address on the Wall (2022), Budapest Diaries (2024), 999: The Forgotten Girls (2023) and The Partisan with the Leica Camera.
 
2. Autobiographical documentaries. Lives in the first-person: The Artist’s Daughter, Oil on Canvas (2022), Egypt, A Love Song (2022). Empty Handed (2021), How to Say Silence (2021), M/Other (2024) and We Used to Sing (2021).
 
3. Israel: Cultural history. People in Israeli context: The Bankers Trial / Mishpat Habankaim (2022, Israel), The Camera of Doctor Morris (2022), Private Death (2021) and Razzouk Tattoo / Yoresh Hakakuim (2022).
 
4. Israel: Contemporary history and politics. Israel in the Middle East: Closed Circuit (2022), 
40 Steps / 40 Tzeadim (2022), Generation 1.5 (2022), Homeboys (2022), Mourning in Lod (2023) and #Schoolyard. An Untold Story (2021).
 
5. October 7, 2023. Chronology of a pogrom: We Will Dance Again (2024) and 06:30 (2024) 
 
All these films are good examples of Ken Burns’ counterintuitive insight about documentary: 
“To the general public, the word ‘documentary’ or ‘nonfiction film’ is a narrow band.  And we think that the feature film is this huge magnificent spectrum.  But if you really look at it, the feature film is      governed by a formula and laws of plot that  make it, I believe, the narrow band in the spectrum.   And it’s the documentary, it’s the nonfiction film, that has so many glorious possibilities.” (Liz Stubbs, Documentary Filmmakers Speak, 2002).
 
I have arranged them chronologically, from newer to older, transcribing the reviews I wrote at the time I screened them for the SIMA Award. Each year has its own blog entry.

2021

 

Empty Handed [Beyadaiym Rekot] (2021, Israel) Dir. Moriya Benavot. 68 min
 
In this absorbing autobiographical documentary, a young Israeli animator records the unfolding of her second pregnancy, and the decision she and her husband make to terminate it after some negative genetic results.  Developing in real time, through intimate conversations between the couple, family phone calls and medical visits, the climax of the film is the abortion procedure.  The interest of this documentary lies in the honest way in which the psychological, emotional and medical issues associated with the taking of an innocent life are presented in a secular framework. Although not explicitly addressed in the couple’s dialogue or the doctors’ advice, the moral and religious aspects end up center stage: we view the couple burying the fetus, accepting its personhood, and asking themselves if the trauma, the guilt and the void they now have will ever leave them.  There is no dramatic or emotional closure to the story and the disclaimer at the end, affirming the reproductive rights of women, feels at odds with what the documentary has revealed about the toll paid for destroying a life.  
 

Empty Handed shows a young director mastering the art of the self-portrait; the sparse and poetic use of animation is a plus. Most importantly, this documentary captures a crucial human rights issue in a raw, unnerving manner. It’s a preface to a most necessary exchange of ideas beyond emotions and a prioris about what abortion does to a human life. Empty Handed can have a social impact.
 

How to Say Silence (2021, Israel) Dir. Shir Newman. 68 min
 

In this first-person documentary the Israeli filmmaker Shir Newman confesses to the camera the effects of trauma – abortion, adoption, sexual assault – on her biological and adoptive grandmothers (both deceased) and herself.  Painful as these family secrets are, the film rarely goes beyond the ‘homemovieness’ of the materials, mostly interviews and scenes staged for the camera. Its best moments involve life in the kibbutz in the 1950s, where the archival materials and one historian shed a stark light on communal dynamics.  Competently shot, edited and scored like a dramatic fiction, the story unfolds by probing these physical and psychological damages, leaping from one character to the other until a two-part climax quietly transitions to an open end.  Unlike other documentaries involving family secrets – Intimate Stranger (1991, Alan Berliner) and My Architect (2003, Nathaniel Kahn) – there is no larger picture here to show the workings of the patriarchy, as How to Say Silence promises in its title.
 
 
A Private Death (2021, Israel) Dir. Marianna Barr. 57 min
 

Through the lens of a personal story, Private Death accomplishes a complicated task almost perfectly: to make a love story unfolding before and after the founding of Israel in 1949, emblematic of a historical moment.  The relationship between a Jewish woman and a Christian businessman of Egyptian origin is rendered à la Citizen Kane by relatives and historians, set against a complex background of political, social and religious threads. Without a voiceover with a stake in the story, what emerges is a heartfelt exploration of competing understandings and expectations for modern day Israel.
 
For my money, the value of this documentary lies precisely in the way the Israeli Palestinian conflict, with roots in the British mandate, is explored, eschewing ideological clichés for well-grounded historical facts.  The interviews with historians lift this hour-long documentary from a serviceable account of rivalries into an insightful probing of how the personal is shaped by historical forces.  Almost like Alan Berliner’s Intimate Stranger (1991), showing a Sephardic family in Egypt shaped by the storms of the 20^th century, Private Death treads a similar path.  

A trove of archival materials – home movies, newsreels and other historical footage – is well used to illustrate the various interviews, with the minor glitch that twenty or so minutes into the film, the personal story is temporarily disconnected from the historical compilation. It’s an editing choice that expands the background at the expense of the love story.

 

#Schoolyard. An Untold Story (2021, Israel) Dir. Nurit Kedar. 70 min         
 

The short preface opening this documentary about the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon to dislodge PLO forces describes “one of the first complications [that] occurred in the town of Sidon when a company of Israeli soldiers were given the task of guarding more than 1,00 detainees in a schoolyard”. Made with the support of public television, Schoolyard interviews a military officer, a medic, several soldiers, and doctors working in a Lebanese hospital, detained for several days, to reconstruct the “complication”.  It led to the death of several detainees, killed by the soldiers in their attempt to keep their military orders. 
 
Schoolyard is an excellent political documentary, pitched right, in tone and execution. A remarkable feat considering the nature of the project: the interviews, covering the whole spectrum, are restrained (à la Night and Fog), so that the facts sink more powerfully without editorial comment, contributing to the strong sense of humanity and sorrow.  The reconstruction of those days via an effective montage of television news, photos from the Israeli archives and a present day visit to the schoolyard where this took place, is a lesson on how to combine oral history with an impactful audiovisual background. The film ends with photos of the dead Lebanese, an editorial strategy that further lifts the film away from partisan politics. It’s a testimony of how freely ideas circulate in the still young state of Israel.
 
 
We Used to Sing (2021, Israel) Dir. Lidia Morozov. 32 min
 

Written, directed and produced by Lidia Morozov, this Israeli short is much more than meets the eye. On the surface, We used to Sing is an impressionistic portrait of the mother and grandmother of the filmmaker, a few scenes (home movies) set in an apartment close to the sea.  The short accomplishes, however, with assuredness of style and substance a complicated portrait of two Russian emigrants, existentially unhappy in their surroundings and tightly bonded by blood and life experiences. Experimental and elegantly executed, the film follows the playbook of Chantal Akerman’s first-person explorations of ordinary life that paint a larger canvas of the Jewish experience.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Documentary treasures: Four years of Israeli non-fiction films - Part 3: 2022

For the past several years I have been a pre-screener of documentaries features and shorts for the Social Impact Media Awards. SIMA is an online platform founded in 2012 by Daniela Kon, to curate, promote and distribute documentaries (https://simastudios.org).
 
What has stood out every year is the number and quality of documentaries made in Israel, produced with private and public funding. It is a thriving scene that deserves ample distribution and scholarly assessment.  Below I discuss a number of excellent titles, made between 2021 and 2024. I have included some of them in the Senses of Cinema World Poll of 2023 and 2024.  

I have organized them in categories, according to their subject matter.

1. The Jewish experience in Europe in the 1940s: The Address on the Wall (2022), Budapest Diaries (2024), 999: The Forgotten Girls (2023) and The Partisan with the Leica Camera.
 
2. Autobiographical documentaries. Lives in the first-person: The Artist’s Daughter, Oil on Canvas (2022), Egypt, A Love Song (2022). Empty Handed (2021), How to Say Silence (2021), M/Other (2024) and We Used to Sing (2021).
 
3. Israel: Cultural history. People in Israeli context: The Bankers Trial / Mishpat Habankaim (2022, Israel), The Camera of Doctor Morris (2022), Private Death (2021) and Razzouk Tattoo / Yoresh Hakakuim (2022).
 
4. Israel: Contemporary history and politics. Israel in the Middle East: Closed Circuit (2022), 
40 Steps / 40 Tzeadim (2022), Generation 1.5 (2022), Homeboys (2022), Mourning in Lod (2023) and #Schoolyard. An Untold Story (2021).
 
5. October 7, 2023. Chronology of a pogrom: We Will Dance Again (2024) and 06:30 (2024) 
 
All these films are good examples of Ken Burns’ counterintuitive insight about documentary: 
“To the general public, the word ‘documentary’ or ‘nonfiction film’ is a narrow band.  And we think that the feature film is this huge magnificent spectrum.  But if you really look at it, the feature film is      governed by a formula and laws of plot that  make it, I believe, the narrow band in the spectrum.   And it’s the documentary, it’s the nonfiction film, that has so many glorious possibilities.” (Liz Stubbs, Documentary Filmmakers Speak, 2002).
 
I have arranged them chronologically, from newer to older, transcribing the reviews I wrote at the time I screened them for the SIMA Award. Each year has its own blog entry.

 

2022

 

The Address on the Wall [2022, Ukraine / Israel] Dir. Serge Krutsenko. 60 min 
 
Ukrainian filmmaker Serge Krutsenko wrote, directed, scored and produced this first-person essay framing Babyn Yar, the ravine outside of Kiev, Ukraine, the site of Nazi mass killings of Jews, and later others, as a meditation on the destruction of life by war and hatred.  Filmed before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the film opens with a short preface by the director linking Babyn Yar with the bombing of Kiev in 2022, making explicit the humanistic anti-war message of the film.
 

Explaining Babyn Yar to audiences who may know next to nothing about this Holocaust site - willfully ignored during the Soviet era - is a challenge, especially when this chapter of the Shoah is reenacted with little means and no sense of epic drama.  The documentary portion is the narrator Alex Anski - who introduces himself as a radio and TV presenter. He walks throughout Kiev showing Jewish sites today. Intercut are the reenactments of the massacre: a young and clueless German soldier; the humiliation and killings of representative Jewish figures. Even though the dramatizations fall flat and the narrator voices platitudes, The Address on the Wall stands as a testimony to historical events.  
            
 
The Artist’s Daughter, Oil on Canvas (2022, Israel) Dir. Margarita Linton. 60 min
 

In a first viewing, The Artist’s Daughter, Oil on Canvas is a first-person documentary about an Israeli filmmaker looking to reconnect with her artist father, following an retrospective of his self-portraits in Tel Aviv.  The film follows her multiple failed attempts to do so, but what becomes clear two thirds into this fascinating “documentary” is that the documentary is deconstructing itself while we are watching it.  Margarita Linton, in her supremely confident first feature, co-directed with her husband Yaniv Linton, reveals the quote/unquote documentary  by filming the casting of the actor playing the voice of her father on the phone and staging an imagined encounter with him; by observing the artist who replicates her father’s paintings; and by interviewing the curator of the art show, who tells her there was no space for his painting “The artist’s daughter”, thus making her erasure tangible. We are told her father is Vladimir Lensky, a Jewish artist who emigrated from the Soviet Union to Israel in the 1980s; however, a quick google search by the viewer yields the name of someone else, a contemporary Ukranian artist from Odessa. 
 

But what is true and raw is the emotional experience the writer / director subjects herself to in order to reach a catharsis, or at least accepting that her father does not want her in his life.  At the end of the film, the viewer still does not know whether any of these two is accomplished. Linton’s story, however, feels real at a level beyond that of the film’s material existence. In fact, a documentary project about her father may not have been possible because of his refusal to participate in it. In this sense, Linton’s point of departure is similar to other directors in the SIMA 24 submissions, who succeeded in documenting specific family experiences: Anonymous Sister, Sam Now and A Silent Story. Besides nailing down her painful experience in the only possible documentary she could make with what she had, the director records an esthetic and emotional wish fulfillment. 
 

From another angle, The Artist’s Daughter seems to follow the playbook of Exit through the Gift Shop (2010), where the still mysterious artist Banksy puts out a documentary about a street artist and amateur filmmaker in Los Angeles, that may not be a documentary after all.  
 
The esthetic prowess of Linton’s gripping film – beautifully executed in terms of editing, cinematography and, yes, mise-en-scène - makes it a rich case study of the documentary's possibilities.
 

The Bankers Trial / Mishpat Habankaim (2022, Israel) Dir. Eliav Lilti
 

This Israeli documentary takes its cue from Michael Moore’s brand of first-person essays on political hot potatoes. The Bankers Trial was shot over several years, beginning in 2014, to capture the interactions and confrontations between Barak Cohen, a lawyer who defaults on a loan by the Leumi bank, and several bankers in Israel. A left-wing activist and a gadfly, Mr. Cohen wants to prove that banks in Israel are corrupt.  This performance activism culminates in a lawsuit by the bankers, ending up in a plea bargain where the only charge to Mr. Cohen and his group is violation of privacy.
 
The documentary is energetically shot, full of bells and whistles in all departments – stylistic choices that are more distracting than effective. The tone is jokey, and the candid camera approach feels too gimmicky at times.  Overall, a serious topic – the behavior of banking institutions in a capitalistic system – ends up getting a lightweight frivolous treatment.
 
 
The Camera of Doctor Morris (2022, Israel) Dir. Itamar Alcalay, Meital Zvieli. 74 min
 

The Camera of Doctor Morris is a triumph of found footage documentary filmmaking. The home movies taken by a Jewish British doctor who moved to Eilat, the Israeli port and resort town in the Negev desert, begin in the 1960s and record mundane events in his family life with an 8mm camera, without sound.  Like Alan Berliner’s investigations of his own family (Intimate Stranger, Nobody’s Business) this documentary shapes home movies – snippets of life – into a beautiful and dramatic portrait of a family immersed in a time and a place.  The narrative is organized mostly chronologically around the filmmakers’ interviews with the mother and three surviving children, now in their fifties, and heard in voiceover. Always behind the camera, the father is the absent figure on screen, though his strong personality is collated from the voiceover interviews. Also absent is the voice of the Down syndrome child, Aviva, who died at age 9. Her radiant presence provides the emotional and dramatic framework of the documentary. 
 

The home movies are beautifully edited, with interesting jumps in time, to capture the span from birth to adulthood once each child is introduced. The family scenes are also provided with realistic sound effects – à la They Shall Not Grow Old(2018). The film thus acquires a lively quality that makes it flow like a breeze. It closes with a brief cell phone recording by the son of the now elderly Dr. Morris, whose last words are a celebration of life. It is followed by a brief sequence where we see each family member on screen, in two photos, then and now.
 
The Camera of Doctor Morris is a delight to watch. Students of the documentary film will find much to learn about how film can shape bits and pieces of life taken by cameras, and now ubiquitous phones, into narratives of universal insight. 
 
 
Closed Circuit (2022, Israel) Dir. Tal Inbar. 55 min
 

The punch of this above par Israeli documentary lies in its extraordinary use of security camera footage. [The adjective is not an exaggeration]. A terrorist act by two Palestinians, shooting at the patrons of a crowded restaurant in a Tel Aviv mall, on June 8, 2016, is literally “reconstructed” by skillfully editing footage from multiple camera sources.  Six years after the event, a handful of survivors are asked about the event and its traumatic aftermath, standing in front of the mall. These interviews of Israeli Jews and Arabs are illustrated exclusively by the security footage of cameras set up high up and edited following the chronology of the attack.  The film moves briskly thanks to a clever use of split screens, blurry transitions, repeated shots, all at the service of organizing a confusion of images into a narrative chockful with drama and suspense, contained by a time and space. The only reenactment – acknowledged in the credits – functions as the restrained climax of the story.
 

The use of surveillance video is not uncommon in documentaries today; the work of German experimental filmmaker Harun Farocki, for example, shows how images are used to inform, persuade and instruct. Interestingly here, images from these security cameras are drained of any partisan meaning vis-à-vis the Palestinian conflict, so that the documentary centers on the cost of a terror attack on people, regardless of their ethnic and religious origins. 
 
Written and directed by Tal Inbar, supported by a variety of public and private Israeli film organizations, and produced by Nancy Spielberg, Closed Circuit is a film to inspire documentary filmmakers on how to tell a story, packing a punch.
 

Egypt, A Love Song (2022, Israel/U.S.) Dir. Iris Zaki. 74 min
 

This excellent interactive documentary provides a solid lesson on how to turn home movie material into a fascinating probe of family relations, and cultural, political and historical identity issues over three generations.  Based on the family story of the director – the marriage of her Muslin and Jewish grandparents in Egypt the 1940s, and her own relationship with her father, their only son – the documentary skillfully weaves the strands of the personal (a riveting story) into a complicated tapestry of locales stretching over seventy years.  Made up on conversations between the writer/director Iris Zaki and her very articulate father Moshe in Israel and New York, the film deftly combines found footage, Egyptian film clips (the grandmother, Souad Zaki was a young singer and actress in 1940s Egypt), family photos, newsreels (updated à la Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old) and reenactments of key family moments. Following the playbook of Alan Berliner’s Intimate Stranger (1991), Egypt, A Love Song has been supported by a variety of Israeli media organizations, including the Israeli Public Broadcasting Corp. 

 
40 Steps / 40 Tzeadim (2022, Israel) Dir. Gad Eisen, Manor Birman. 78 min.
 

Like Sansón and Me (2022), an outstanding film with explicit and implicit levels of meaning, 40 Steps pushes the boundary of documentary through an effective use of the tools of fiction storytelling.  40 Steps – one year in the life of two elementary schools in South Tel Aviv, one religious, the other secular – uses a vérité approach very successfully to reveal the larger contours of a conflict: the clashes between the directors of the schools represent larger issues in modern Israel – assimilation, the role of faith, gentrification, patriotism and a substantial etcetera.  Built as a structure of opposites at every level – especially through editing – the narrative unfolds so tidily that one wonders how much scenes – all of them offering drama and powerful insights - were staged for the camera.  Exactly along the lines of the original masterpiece that is Nanook of the North (1922). 
 

In this topnotch documentary, the principals obviously play themselves through speech and actions; the camera reveals the distinctive personalities of school children and their parents; and the interaction between the principals and the neighborhood activists are marked by real arguments for and against schooling immigrant and how best to preserve Jewish identity.  
 
After viewing the documentary, the impression is that 40 Steps stands in the intersection of documentary and fiction: not a docudrama (the closest fiction comes to documentary territory), and neither a standard documentary (where the traits of the genre are recognizable markers). The “creative treatment of actuality”, that elusive territory described by Grierson, is in full bloom in this first-rate documentary.

 
Generation 1.5 (2022, Israel) Dir. Roman Shumonov. 80 min

This excellent documentary gives an in-depth view of the impact of Jews emigrating to Israel when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.  It is done in the tradition of the expository documentary, aimed at informing, educating and entertaining its audience. Classic Grierson in its approach and execution.  There is a distinctive category of documentaries that may fly under the radar because their style and form don’t call attention to themselves, or their subject matter is not flashy, progressive or in the headlines.  Generation 1.5 is one of those works that accomplishes far more than what is initially announced.  In this case, an engaging, no holds-barred examination of the wave of immigrants that arrived as children and adolescents to a society in the antipodes of Soviet Russia. Two key talking heads – a sociologist and a public intellectual – provide the political and cultural context for the stories of several men and women in their late 20s now who relate to camera how they have lived the immigration experience at a personal and family level. It is, in the words of an insightful young woman, “a grueling, tough and complex tale of courage … not an heroic tale of courage”.  This is exactly what each one in this very articulate group brings to the documentary. Several emigrant parents are interviewed, sometimes in conversation with their now adult children, assessing the gains and losses in language and identity of the acculturation process. 

Generation 1.5 relies on a wealth nicely integrated archival materials, from poignant home movies in the Soviet Union to television footage since the 1990s, B-roll and images of present-day Israel. To commend is the first-rate montage of the implosion of the Soviet Union. 

Directed by established Israeli filmmaker Roman Shumunov (Back to Chernobyl, 2020) and cowritten with Raya Schuster, the 90-minute version seen here is either the first of three episodes, or a compilation of the 2022 documentary miniseries listed in IMDb. The series is distributed by the well-known Israeli outfit Go2Films so this cut could be for festival circulation. 

 
Universal in the way it reflects the emigration experience past and present, and spot on in capturing its impact plus a host of issues attached to migration and settlement, Generation 1.5 is a documentary not to be missed.

Homeboys (2022, Israel) Dir. Tamar Goren. 60 min
 

This lovely observational documentary captures the creative process of two young South-Sudanese teenagers deported from Israel to Uganda. Over two weeks, in the boarding school for refugees and with the help of an Israeli musician, they compose and record hip hop songs.  Low-key and insightful, Homeboys captures the joy, sadness and struggles of these two young musicians, and the other refugees in the boarding school, whose future looks bleak.  The film, however, celebrates the resilience of the human spirit, via music and the protagonists’innate optimism that things may get better.  Nicely edited and scored, the documentary makes the most of the verité approach.

The Partisan with the Leica Camera (2022, Israel) Dir. Ruth Walk. 55 min

This is a terrific historical documentary written and directed by Ruth Walk, a veteran Israeli filmmaker, that covers the life story of a Polish Jewish couple, who joined a partisan group in World War II. Similar stories have been told before, in oral histories, books and films, but this documentary offers a good case study on how old photos, insightful interviews and solid research become an "archeological dig" to reconstruct hitherto unknown lives that intersect with history.

Mundek Lukawiecki and Hannah Bern are remembered by their son, granddaughter and other people who knew them in the newly founded Israel, where they emigrated after the war. The record of their lives is mostly photos taken by Mundek, a professional photographer with a serviceable Leica camera, lovingly preserved by their son. The photos have been beautifully digitized, and used in interesting ways agains real life backgrounds, to provide a visual context to the war. Locations in Acre, Israel, and present-day Poland add to the vividness of the portraits. A larger picture also emerges sharply in the film, encompassing the Holocaust, the toll war takes on soldiers, the impact of the past in a family, and Israel as a place for a new beginning.

Deceivingly simple in its structure, elegantly executed (all the technical departments shine), The Partisan with the Leica Camera is another example of the quality documentaries supported by Israeli public and private cultural organizations.They speak of a level of excellence not easily found elsewhere.

 

Razzouk Tattoo / Yoresh Hakakuim (2022, Israel) Dir. Orit Ofir Ronell. 80 min

 

The director and team of this first-rate Israeli documentary pull quite a feat by shaping an oral history of sorts with a well-constructed open-ended mystery story. Razzouk Tattoo keeps you glued to the screen!
 
The Razzouk, a Christian family of Egyptian Coptic lineage living in Jerusalem’s old quarter, has been making tattoos on pilgrims visiting the holy sites, for more than five hundred years, as they note.  With care and insight, through interviews with articulate family members, the viewers are treated to the tattoo process (tastefully done, considering the bloody procedure) and also shown  the ancient seals used for their designs.  Those beautiful wooden seals – lovingly displayed, and also the subject of the book framing their story – are no longer an intact collection. Their scattering is at the core of the thriller, involving a family feud, investigated through photos and recollections but never resolved.  The musical score undergirding the mystery narrative provides a fascinating contrast to the camera slowly roaming through an ancient church, the biblical landscape outside of Jerusalem and the warm and tasteful family homes.  An eloquent study in contrasts – history and present day, the sacred and the profane, tradition and modernity – Razzouk Tatto shows how accurate is Ken Burns when he notes the huge magnificent spectrum in which documentary operates. 
 

Like many Israeli documentaries, this one has been supported by some of the key entities in the film landscape, like the Israel Cinema Project, The Rabinovich Foundations for the Arts, the Israel Film Council, the Israeli Ministry of Culture and Sport and the Doc Lab of the Tel Aviv Film Festival.
 
 
 

Documentary treasures: Four years of Israeli non-fiction films. Part 2: 2023

For the past several years I have been a pre-screener of documentaries features and shorts for the Social Impact Media Awards. SIMA is an online platform founded in 2012 by Daniela Kon, to curate, promote and distribute documentaries (https://simastudios.org).
 
What has stood out every year is the number and quality of documentaries made in Israel, produced with private and public funding. It is a thriving scene that deserves ample distribution and scholarly assessment.  Below I discuss a number of excellent titles, made between 2021 and 2024. I have included some of them in the Senses of Cinema World Poll of 2023 and 2024.  

I have organized them in five main categories, according to subject matter: 

1. The Jewish experience in Europe in the 1940s: The Address on the Wall (2022), Budapest Diaries (2024), 999: The Forgotten Girls (2023) and The Partisan with the Leica Camera.
 
2. Autobiographical documentaries. Lives in the first-person: The Artist’s Daughter, Oil on Canvas (2022), Egypt, A Love Song (2022). Empty Handed (2021), How to Say Silence (2021), M/Other (2024) and We Used to Sing (2021).
 
3. Israel: Cultural history. People in Israeli context: The Bankers Trial / Mishpat Habankaim (2022, Israel), The Camera of Doctor Morris (2022), Private Death (2021) and Razzouk Tattoo / Yoresh Hakakuim (2022).
 
4. Israel: Contemporary history and politics. Israel in the Middle East: Closed Circuit (2022), 
40 Steps / 40 Tzeadim (2022), Generation 1.5 (2022), Homeboys (2022), Mourning in Lod (2023) and #Schoolyard. An Untold Story (2021).
 
5. October 7, 2023. Chronology of a pogrom: We Will Dance Again (2024) and 06:30 (2024) 
 
All these films are good examples of Ken Burns’ counterintuitive insight about documentary: 
“To the general public, the word ‘documentary’ or ‘nonfiction film’ is a narrow band.  And we think that the feature film is this huge magnificent spectrum.  But if you really look at it, the feature film is      governed by a formula and laws of plot that  make it, I believe, the narrow band in the spectrum.   And it’s the documentary, it’s the nonfiction film, that has so many glorious possibilities.” (Liz Stubbs, Documentary Filmmakers Speak, 2002).
 
I have arranged them chronologically, from newer to older, transcribing the reviews I wrote at the time I screened them for the SIMA Award. Each year has its own blog entry.

2023

 

999: The Forgotten Girls (2023, U.S.) Dir. Heather Dune Macadam, Beatriz M. Calleja. 87 min . [Not an Israeli documentary. Included for subject matter and interviewees]

            
999: The Forgotten Girls is a topnotch documentary combining a decade of archival research in public and private repositories, with oral history-style interviews in a gripping narrative structure, to present the story of the first contingent of young unmarried Jewish women, sent from annexed Czechoslovakia to Auschwitz /Birkenau in 1942. Directed by historian Heather Dune Macadam, based on her book 999: The Extraordinary Young Women of the First Jewish Transport to Auschwitz (2020), the film is a superb example of how editing literally “builds” a documentary from diverse materials: photos and home movies, prisoner art, commissioned drawings and brief excerpts from other films. It is a powerful audiovisual portrait of grit, courage, optimism and solidarity, about women who recount their lives between 1942 and 1945, without specific footage, about their camp survival experience.  
 

The interviews with a handful of survivors, began in 2012, are organized as a chronicle with multiple threads, firmly held by narrator Ramita Navai, that mixes the vivid recollection of women now in their 90s, with occasional dramatizations. The result is a strong narrative and engaging characters recounting “the horror, the horror” with emotional restrain and sensibility, and a tragic ending for most of the 999 contingent rescued from historical oblivion. The 999 names whose are movingly displayed in a recurring background. The point of view keeps the story centered on the personal and the feminine, so it’s no surprise that the documentary wraps up the individual stories with tender accounts of lives built with beauty and goodness after the ordeal was over.  The closeup of the arm of one of them, with a camp number visibly tattooed, now old, caressing a baby encapsulates the profound humanity of the project.
 

The director relied on skillful editor Beatriz M. Calleja, credited as co-director, and the decades long expertise of PBS and HBO Susan Lacy. The original soundtrack and songs give the documentary its beautiful spiritual tone.  Like other historical documentaries grounded on personal stories, including Budapest Diaries, Armenians, The Hidden Grandmothers and My Stolen Planet, 999: The Forgotten Girls is a case study on how to blend disparate materials in a coherent story.
 
 
Mourning in Lod (2023, Israel) Dir. Hilla Medalia. 72 min
            

With a remarkable sense of story structure and an open end that refuses a neat resolution to the interwoven stories of Israeli Jews and Arabs in a town near Tel Aviv, Hilla Medalia makes another documentary on a knotty subject.  It is a riveting film combining powerful, heartfelt interviews by family members who lost dear ones or gained a life thanks to a transplant from one of them; archival footage (from television news, cellphones, security cameras) and dramatic scenes staged for the camera, like the visit paid by the Arab woman who received the transplant to the Jewish family grieving for their dead father. 
 

The director and her collaborators plunge into a minefield but come out delivering a striking documentary about mourning, the difficulty but not the impossibility of dialogue, and the complicated status of ethnic and religious relations in Israel today.  The situation in the country now (I’m writing these comments almost a month after the massacre of Israelis by a Muslim terrorist organization) is given not a bird’s-eye-view of complex politics but an understanding of what it means for Arabs and Jews to live as neighbors in one town.

Mourning in Lod does not favor a point of view over others, neither offers praise or condemnation, or espouses “what-aboutism”. It is an honest and raw look from all angles, giving space to viewers to reach their own conclusions, with an above par use of the documentary strategies.  Bombarded like we are by ideologies and propaganda, Mourning in Lod offers a sober look not to be missed. 
 
 

  

Documentary treasures: Four years of Israeli non-fiction films. Part 1: 2024

 

For the past several years I have been a pre-screener of documentaries features and shorts for the Social Impact Media Awards. SIMA is an online platform founded in 2012 by Daniela Kon, to curate, promote and distribute documentaries (https://simastudios.org).
 
What has stood out every year is the number and quality of documentaries made in Israel, produced with private and public funding. It is a thriving scene that deserves ample distribution and scholarly assessment.  Below I discuss a number of excellent titles, made between 2021 and 2024. I have included some of them in the Senses of Cinema World Poll of 2023 and 2024.  

I have organized them in five main categories, according to subject matter: 

1. The Jewish experience in Europe in the 1940s: The Address on the Wall (2022), Budapest Diaries (2024), 999: The Forgotten Girls (2023) and The Partisan with the Leica Camera.
 
2. Autobiographical documentaries. Lives in the first-person: The Artist’s Daughter, Oil on Canvas (2022), Egypt, A Love Song (2022). Empty Handed (2021), How to Say Silence (2021), M/Other (2024) and We Used to Sing (2021).
 
3. Israel: Cultural history. People in Israeli context: The Bankers Trial / Mishpat Habankaim (2022, Israel), The Camera of Doctor Morris (2022), Private Death (2021) and Razzouk Tattoo / Yoresh Hakakuim (2022).
 
4. Israel: Contemporary history and politics. Israel in the Middle East: Closed Circuit (2022), 
40 Steps / 40 Tzeadim (2022), Generation 1.5 (2022), Homeboys (2022), Mourning in Lod (2023) and #Schoolyard. An Untold Story (2021).
 
5. October 7, 2023. Chronology of a pogrom: We Will Dance Again (2024) and 06:30 (2024) 
 
All these films are good examples of Ken Burns’ counterintuitive insight about documentary: 
“To the general public, the word ‘documentary’ or ‘nonfiction film’ is a narrow band.  And we think that the feature film is this huge magnificent spectrum.  But if you really look at it, the feature film is  governed by a formula and laws of plot that  make it, I believe, the narrow band in the spectrum.   And it’s the documentary, it’s the nonfiction film, that has so many glorious possibilities.” (Liz Stubbs, Documentary Filmmakers Speak, 2002).
 
I have arranged them chronologically, from newer to older, transcribing the reviews I wrote at the time I screened them for the SIMA Award. Each year has its own blog entry.
 

2024

 
Budapest Diaries (2024, Israel) Written and directed by Shay Fogelman. 60 min                
            

An above par expository documentary in the excellent tradition of contemporary Israeli cinema dealing with historical and political matters, Budapest Stories starts with a simple and elegant conceit: the last year of World War II in Budapest as captured by diaries kept by Hungarian Jews and Catholics, ordinary people who give a vivid account, day by day, month by month, both tragic and mundane, of the brutal experience. Rescued from attics and trashcans many decades later, these diaries are phenomenally illustrated by a wealth of archival materials from the period. Much of it will not be familiar to general audiences and is so seamlessly cut to the interviews of Hungarian and Israeli historians and family descendants, that these accounts, nicely interwoven and chronologically arranged with photos identifying each writer, conjure up a world remembered in black-and-white. 
 
Journalist and documentary filmmaker Shay Fogelman and a group of solid collaborators put together a remarkable film, that keeps a tight rein on emotions, a contrast with the haunting impact of Ann Frank’s diary recordings on readers and audiences.  There is no overall narrator to shape the arc of the stories, unlike Ken Burns in the recent U.S. and the Holocaust (2022). The diary writers and their children and grandchildren provide a rich context, showing how the experience of ordinary people give insights into a historical period.  In this sense Budapest Stories looks at the Shoah as it unfolded in Hungary at the tail end of World War II, with accuracy and detail.  And since the October 7, 2023, attack of a terrorist organization against Jews, with genocidal intent, Budapest Stories gains a poignant relevance.

 
M/Other (2024, Israel) Dir. Iris Zaki. 18 min
 

Israeli filmmaker Iris Zaki recurs to a simple narrative trick to make three mothers have a one-on-one conversation with their daughters about why they don’t want to have children: she switches the pairs. What ensues is a 15-minute candid and honest exchange of opposing views between an older, conservative generation and a younger secular and progressive progeny. There is no dramatic construction, climax or epiphany in this first-person documentary, just the contours of two camps at war about the role of women, family, and tradition (all key topics in contemporary Israel). Zaki bets on the dialogues, which flow smoothly and politely, with insights here and there that could have benefitted from a longer format. In passing, two of the daughters confess to abortion as a means to preserve control.
 

Two feature films of Iris Zaki have been excellent SIMA contenders in previous years, Egypt, A Love Song (2022) and Unsettling (2018). They have in common with this short, included in the New York Times Op-Doc series, an emphasis on capturing dialogue in a way that builds up an often fractious or contested world, involving life, history and politics in Israel today.  In this sense, M/Other – a clever and revealing pun – is a building block in portraying modern Israel, attuned to issues of generational change, feminism and agency. This short opens interesting vistas and hopefully a larger project can be developed from these interviews/conversations about clear-eyed women. 
            

 
We Will Dance Again (2024, Israel) Dir. Yariv Mozer. 89 min
            

This Israeli documentary is the Night and Fog (1956) of our times. Using black-and-white archival materials about the methodical destruction of the European Jews by the Nazi regime, bookended with color footage of the extermination camps a decade later,  Night and Fog is a large scale record of the Shoah, that still impacts powerfully.  Almost seven decades later, We Will Dance Again provides a brutal account of October 7, 2023, the largest massacres of Jews since the Holocaust.  It chronicles of the Hamas terrorist attack to the Nova Music Festival, combining harrowing cellphone footage from young Israelis attending the concert, with the terrorists’ body cameras, and security cameras. What makes this film a remarkable document – above and beyond its technical achievements in editing, cinematography, story structure and sound - is that it captures in real time, from multiple witnesses, what it was to find oneself, in a split second, on a journey through hell.  Following the narrative strategy of the observational documentary, the story unfolds in front of us as if we don’t know where it will take us, creating an increasingly inescapable and immersive space for “the horror, the horror”.  

We are literally made to share first the incomprehension, then the incredulity and finally the terror of the slaughter.  The interviews with survivors are similar in quality and impact to 06:30, another powerful Israeli entry on October 7. But what makes them stand out here is that those interviewed become characters in the documentary – with a background story illustrated by comments and photos of a happier time.  They all participate in a chronicle of a death announced, with writer/director Yariv Mozer functioning like Homer in the Iliad, giving each one individuality and the full measure of a life. Acts of heroism recounted here are shown in cell video, the most haunting perhaps is the now well-known case of the young man who kept throwing back to Hamas the grenades lobbed at group in a shelter. 
 
We Will Dance Again is both a testament to the grit of the Israeli nation and a powerful document of what film can do to capture and show the truth.  
 
 
06:30 (2024, Israel) Dir. Alon Daniel. 64 min
            

Made for Israeli public television, this remarkable documentary tackles the terrorist attack of October 7, 2023. It is an hour-long chronicle of the brutal event recounted in detail by survivors from the music festival and the kibbutzim, including a hostage and a paramedic. A precise timeline of hours and minutes is the framework containing the recollections of the witnesses, single or in pairs, who provide vivid memories and gut reactions about their brush with death and hell. The settings for the interviews are their familiar environments, with wounds visible to the audience, a visual contrast to the emotional restraint sought by the filmmakers in the witnesses' delivery tone.
 
Written and directed by Alon Daniel, this above par documentary uses miniatures and Lego-style animation to illustrate the harrowing stories, eschewing the use of narrator and jarring archival footage. It is a decision that pays off esthetically and emotionally, since it unifies the multiple voices into a continuum, that emphasizes the human and eschews on-your-face politics and ideology. It’s a bet that brings the documentary above a run-of-the mill television documentary.
 

06:30, named after the time the attacks began, provides an interesting case study on how to present what Joseph Conrad called “the horror, the horror”, via images and sounds.  In its esthetic choices, it is reminiscent of the SIMA 2022 entry Eternal Spring, that reconstructs through animation the central event for which there is no footage. It shares with the 2025 SIMA entry, Budapest Diaries, a foregrounding of the personal and human, over politics, a decision that paradoxically – in both documentaries – brings out the contours of the latter very vividly.