Canadian filmmaker Elle Flanders lucked out when she discovered a trove of home movies shot by her Israeli grandparents during the formative years of the Jewish state.
The sunlit sequences, woven throughout her undeniably powerful documentary-cum-screed, “Zero Degrees of Separation,” are remarkable. From glimpses of immigrants arriving by boat from Eastern Europe to hilltop views of cities sans skyscrapers, the footage evokes the mythic Israel of fairy tales. The aesthetic pleasure is considerable, and Flanders is not unmindful of it. But her real thrust is political, and she employs the vintage movies — sometimes subtly, but usually like a mallet — to point up the difference between the Zionist ideal that inspired the new nation and the current militarized state.
The film purports to be a portrait of two mixed Arab-Israeli couples, one lesbian and one gay, but it gradually veers into a full-on critique of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and its treatment of the Palestinians.
“Zero Degrees of Separation” will be shown Wednesday, June 22, as part of Frameline29, the S.F. International LGBT Film Festival. The documentary also screens next month in the S.F. Jewish Film Festival.
Ezra, a garrulous Israeli plumber and activist in his 50s, lives with his Arab partner and co-worker Selim in West Jerusalem. A good chunk of the documentary consists of Ezra driving through the West Bank, pointing out various hassles and indignities that the Israeli government has visited on the Palestinians.
Checkpoints and the wall are familiar to most American Jewish viewers, as is the army’s commitment to protecting the settlers. Nonetheless, it’s surprising to learn that 400,000 Jews live in the territories (as of June 2002, according to the film), and that there were 85 manned military checkpoints.
In Ezra’s view, the government’s policy vis-a-vis the Palestinians is one of harassment and displacement rather than self-protection. “The whole point is, in one word, transfer,” he asserts.
Ezra jeers at the way the Israeli government has turned the bulldozer into a negative symbol — as a tool, say, for demolishing Palestinian homes. Somewhat predictably, Flanders follows with a ’50s home-movie sequence of Israelis using a bulldozer to build, not destroy.
Edit and Samira are also politically outspoken, not surprisingly. Edit, a social worker at a Tel Aviv rape crisis center, declares, “Zionism does not take into account that there was another nation here.”
But their relationship is more intriguing than Ezra and Selim’s because they provide more of a window into the tensions and compromises of their life together. For example, Edit, whose parents fled Argentina before the coup, embraces Yom HaAtzmaout (Israel Independence Day) as a major holiday.
But to Samira, an oncology nurse, the same day marks al-Nakba (The Catastrophe). So while Edit goes out with friends, Samira stays inside and listens to Lebanese singer Fairuz’s tunes of longing and regret.
Flanders, who showed a 20-minute work-in-progress two years ago at the S.F. International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival followed by a panel discussion, delivers a brilliant opening half-hour that’s as thoughtful as it is thought-provoking.
But what’s frustrating is that by the last half-hour she’s completely fallen under Ezra’s spell. In a scene that is as endless as it is pointless, we watch him berate a pair of soldiers in a jeep who interrupt his hanging out with some Palestinian friends in a West Bank field.
By that point, “Zero Degrees” is no longer an inquiry or even an evaluation. It’s a polemic.
“Zero Degrees of Separation” screens at 6 p.m. Wednesday, June 22,
at the Victoria Theatre, 2961 16th St., as part of Frameline29, the S.F. International LGBT Film Festival. Tickets: (925) 866-9559 or www.frameline.org.