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.