Verité documentaries, which capture events as they unfold, offer a visceral experience of a volatile situation. Precisely because they’re valued for their timeliness, not their historical perspective, breaking developments can date them in a hurry.
Yoav Shamir’s riveting “5 Days” and Gil Karni’s contemplative “Troubled Water” are the latest films to run afoul of the truism that documentaries about the Middle East have a miniscule shelf life. Both deal with the removal of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip, a hot-button topic until the war against Hamas and Hezbollah erupted this month.
An exemplary journalistic endeavor, “5 Days” retains some interest beyond the moment for its insights into the Israeli army and the religious settler movement. The less substantive “Troubled Water” takes a human-interest angle by focusing on a single family, and plays like a minor footnote to a bigger story.
“5 Days” screens four times in the Jewish Film Festival, all co-presented by the JCC East Bay. “Troubled Water” plays the Berkeley leg of the festival in a co-presentation with the American Friends Service Committee.
“5 Days” is a ground-level view of the showdown last August between the army and the 8,000 settlers in Gush Katif and nearby outposts. Surprisingly, since the film was sold for broadcast overseas and has an English narration, there’s almost no explication of the various political arguments. That turns out to be a good thing, for debate is irrelevant in the heat of the moment, when the players can only act and react.
The key figure proves to be Maj. Gen. Dan Harel, the white-haired, white-bearded officer in charge of the evacuation. “We carry the heavy burden of democracy on our backs,” he says, kindly but firmly. “There are no winners.”
The settlers try to cajole and enlist the soldiers, and when that doesn’t work some resort to insults. When a soldier responds to a settler’s tirade by steadily looking at the ground, she angrily rebukes him, “You don’t deserve to look a Jewish woman in the eye.”
It’s equally uncomfortable to see a boy call a soldier a Nazi for following orders without question. A shot of two female policemen crying on each other’s shoulders at having to uproot Jewish families confirms the offensiveness and absurdity of that slur.
At the same time, one can understand the settlers’ disappointment, outrage and feeling of betrayal. Their religious pain at having to cede part of what they consider Eretz Yisroel to Arabs is palpable, but the evacuation is also a media event so some of the behavior may be for the benefit of the cameras.
“5 Days” will be seen by a wider audience when it airs Aug. 14 on the Sundance Channel. For those concerned about Israel’s image in the U.S. at this precarious moment, the humane, reasonable yet resolute Maj. Gen. Harel is more than you could ask for.
There are no heroic characters in “Troubled Water,” just ordinary folks. The 15 families who sought a land grant from the government in 1990 had no religious basis for wishing to live in the Gaza Strip. The Mediterranean was the attraction, and a Greek fishing village was their model.
Hilton or Sheraton would have long ago snapped up the lovely spot they were granted, if only Gaza wasn’t a couple of kilometers away. The filmmakers make the most of the waterfront location with countless postcard shots.
The settlers of Dugit, especially Ronni Cohen and his family, got on famously with the nearby Palestinian fishermen. Until the al Aksa intifada, that is, and the army sealed off the Palestinians from the settlement. The period of coexistence was over, and the Jewish fishermen’s suspicions and prejudices came roaring back.
Unfortunately, the majority of the film is set not during the friendship period but afterward. Life goes on — the settlement goes through a building phase that relocates the Cohens from their modest shack on the beach to a modern house away from the water — then grinds inexorably toward disengagement and evacuation.
We’re not especially moved when the Cohens have to leave, their compensation checks in hand, for they never earned our empathy. They aren’t victims of war or politics, nor did they stake everything on religious conviction.
They could be any family moving out of a house after 15 years. That it’s in the Gaza Strip, and the Israeli army is lending a hand, doesn’t much matter.
“5 Days” screens at 5 p.m. Thursday, July 27 at the Castro Theatre in S.F., 4:30 p.m. Sunday, July 30 at the Roda Theatre in Berkeley, 8:15 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 2 at the Century in Mountain View and 2 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 6 at the Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael. “Troubled Water” plays at 7:30 p.m. Sunday, July 30 at the Roda Theatre.