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.