The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival perennially catches flak (especially in j.’s letters) for presenting documentaries that are critical of Israel and sympathetic to the Palestinians.
Often overlooked is that the majority of these films receive funding from the Israeli government, and play festivals and receive national television broadcasts at home.
Independent documentarians, remember, often go into that line of work to call attention to perceived injustices, not to trumpet the status quo and salute the powerful. Those inclined to the latter make campaign commercials or propaganda, Leni Riefenstahl’s lifelong disputations to the contrary notwithstanding.
What is forgotten amid the controversy is that the lion’s share of those documentaries — including this year’s hard-hitting trio of “Wall,” “On the Objection Front” and “Massacre” — aspire to shed more light than heat on the touchiest subjects. All three address aspects of the Mideast conflict that receive almost no coverage in the U.S. news media and are of interest to those who consider themselves well informed.
To Simone Bitton, the trilingual, Moroccan-born Jewish director of “Wall,” fear is the main stumbling block between Jews and Arabs, and it cannot be erased or anesthetized by erecting a gargantuan security barrier.
The greatest engineering project in Israeli history, as Gen. Amos Yaron of the Ministry of Defense notes in a lengthy interview, costs $2 million per kilometer. The concrete wall is just the most prominent and blunt instrument in a barrier system that is 50 meters wide and includes cameras, radar, sensors, ditches, barbed wire and watchtowers.
Bitton’s stunningly photographed film, with its wide vistas and long takes, provides ample and disturbing evidence of the security barrier’s imprimatur on the landscape — even when it’s still just a long gash running through a valley. As for the people living on either side, her interviews with Arabs and Jews suggest that the barrier is counterproductive to achieving a successful long-term peace agreement.
According to one psychiatrist, 24 percent of Palestinian youth want to become a martyr and die in a suicide attack. That might be seen as a point in favor of a security barrier, but the film manages to suggest how the fence doesn’t only confine hatred, but also engenders it.
“Wall,” an acutely disturbing Rorschach test no matter where one stands politically, is co-sponsored by the David R. Stern Fund at the Agape Foundation, and is co-presented by the American Friends Service Committee and the World Affairs Council of Northern California.
Shiri Tsur’s hourlong “On the Objection Front” focuses on half a dozen officers in the Israel Defense Forces who publicly declared their refusal to serve in the West Bank and Gaza. Courageous and articulate, they represent — depending on your viewpoint — either the highest embodiment of Jewish moral principles or the kind of intolerable disloyalty that compromises the defense of a small, endangered nation.
A pithy, powerful film despite its somewhat scattershot approach, “On the Objection Front” provides a selective cross section rather than a comprehensive overview or unfolding drama.
The movie ends with a marvelous audio clip from David Ben-Gurion’s farewell speech to the IDF in which he looks to the day when Israel would no longer rely so heavily on its military. The great gulf between his vision and the present situation is reminiscent of outgoing President Eisenhower’s unheeded warning about the dangers of the U.S. military-industrial complex.
The words most likely to elicit applause from a San Francisco audience, though, are spoken by one of the 27 pilots (and more than 600 soldiers in total) who announced his decision not to serve beyond the Green Line.
“I refuse to live in a country and serve in an army [where] it is systematically required to hurt civilians,” he calmly declares.
No such qualms seem to hinder the Christian Arab guerrillas who slaughtered hundreds of men, women, children and even animals in the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila in Beirut in1982.
“Massacre,” directed by Monika Borgmann and Hermann Thiessen of Germany and Lokman Slim of Lebanon, is a rough-hewn oral history of the period provided by several men who wielded the knives and pulled the triggers.
At the time of the massacre, Israel controlled southern Lebanon, including the refugee camps. The question remains: How did the Christian Arabs gain access?
According to a couple of the murderers interviewed in the documentary, the Israelis did more than look the other way — they provided training and uniforms. Whether one finds the interviewees credible on all counts is, obviously, subjective.
But a particularly dubious recollection — that a group of Arabs who’d been sent to Eilat for military instruction were awakened one morning by a female Israeli soldier in the buff — casts a shadow of doubt on other statements.
The film is shot with a handheld camera in various bare and poorly lit rooms and, since the murderers wish to remain anonymous, they are framed so we don’t see their faces. There is no newsreel footage of the savagery, although the filmmakers surprise their subjects with grisly black-and-white photographs.
“Massacre,” which is co-presented by Amnesty International USA, is one of those films with undeniable historical and archival value. It has less to offer to the casual viewer, however.
The inclusion of these three films reflects the Jewish Film Festival’s resolve to hold Israel to a high moral standard. The keenness of Bay Area moviegoers to turn out to see them speaks to Jews’ admirable willingness to examine our mistakes, misjudgments and violations.
“Wall” and “On the Objection Front” will screen at the Castro Theatre in S.F., the Roda Theatre in Berkeley, the Mountain View Century and the Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael. “Massacre” will screen at all locations except the Smith Rafael. For details, (925) 275-9490 or www.sfjff.org.