LOCATION:
Carpenter Center, Harvard University.
24
Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
Tickets: $10
Z32
(81 mins, 2008, Israel/France)
Avi Mograbi’s presentation at the Venice
Film Festival this year seemingly offered an
interesting approach towards a difficult theme
in which the filmmaker questions his own political
and artistic approach. The film, based on real
interviews, but concealing the attester’s
identity is set up as a musical documentary
tragedy. An Israeli ex-soldier who participated
in a revenge operation where two Palestinian
policemen were murdered, seeks forgiveness for
what he has done. His girlfriend does not think
it is that simple and she raises issues he is
not ready to address yet. ....
Avi
Mograbi’s documentary essay takes the
themes of Cannes hit Waltz With Bashir
one step further and explores the guilt
that many Israelis face every day of their lives.Mograbi
films a young soldier who takes full responsibility
for the war crimes he has committed but expects
to be forgiven. Less visually spectacular than
Bashir but just as powerful and painful, this
unconventional picture is perfect festival fare
and though its hard ironic edge may mean the
film does not have the same cathartic effect
as Bashir, it should find an art house niche
internationally.
Structured
like a Brechtian piece with songs and music,
the film begins with a young couple talking
into a video camera as they try to make sense
of their relationship (their faces are masked
to prevent identification). We next see Mograbi
explaining the outline of his project and working
with composer Noam Enbar on songs that are Kurt
Weillian in style. The film then turns into
an interview with a former member of an elite
military unit who turns out to be one half of
the couple from the opening scenes. Also digitally
disguised, he describes the training he received
– training which turned young men into
trigger-happy killing machines – and then
recounts one operation in which his unit was
dispatched to avenge the murder of a group of
Israeli soldiers by killing an equal number
of innocent Palestinian policemen picked at
random at an isolated roadblock. Mograbi and
the young man go out together to search for
the peaceful little village where the operation
took place. The film then returns to the couple
with the man hopelessly trying to alleviate
his guilt by having his girlfriend repeat in
her own words the horrific tale he has just
confessed to. Aided by Philippe Bellaiche’s
effective, mostly handheld camera, Mograbi cuts
between all these sequences with such seamless
results that one wonders whether the film wasn’t
written to a script and whether the ex solider
and his girlfriend aren’t actors. Ultimately,
it doesn’t matter for Mograbi’s
material rings true.The director’s blackly
ironic commentary (half of it sung by Mograbi
himself) underlines his own uneasy ambivalence
towards his subject. His protagonist may be
a likeable person but he is also a murderer
and may even have enjoyed killing at the time.
Is this young man one of us or a monster in
disguise? No wonder his girlfriend, when he
asks if she thinks he is a killer or not, can’t
give a straight answer.
Mograbi
fleshes out this agonising moral issue confronting
Israel, whose soldiers are expected to defend
their own land and to police a territory which
is not legally theirs. Some won’t like
Mograbi’s position, others will, but many
will probably prefer to ignore it. (via
screendaily)