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.