“Pickles, Inc.” is not the typical documentary being produced in Israel nowadays. It is a touching, yet rather straightforward story of eight Palestinian-Israeli widows who decide to start a company making, marketing, and selling pickles out of the Palestinian city of Tamra in the Northern Galilee region. The film documents a two-year process that begins with the opening of the factory and ends with its closing.
From the standpoint of film criticism, there is not much praise to lavish on “Pickles, Inc.” The lighting and cinematography tend to be inartistic and inconsistent, the editing is choppy, and the narrative never fully develops. Our eventual empathy for the women seems more a product of our own choice than of skillful filmmaking. Meanwhile, side stories, like one woman’s relationships with her daughters, are haphazardly thrown into the main narrative, and then dropped prematurely.
Fortunately, what the film lacks in artistic merit, it more than makes up for in the political and ethical issues that it raises, if even unintentionally. The film offers a very different representation of Arab areas in Israel than what is generally shown on major American media outlets: there is no poverty, no anger, no stone throwing. Instead, we see middle class Arab women in peaceful looking surroundings trying to run a business.
The political situation between Israelis and Palestinians in the larger geopolitical area is not mentioned once. In her statement on the PBS website, director Dalit Kimor said the exclusion was not limited to the final product but was constitutive of the production process as well: “Not one political word was uttered throughout the filming,” she said. “But we did exchange many recipes and jokes.”
The decision to film the lives of these women without giving any background information on their economic or social conditions raises some serious questions: Where do individual stories fit into broad political themes? Is it legitimate to film a small segment of society without reflecting on the broader issues affecting that segment? For this film in particular, the viewer must ask whose interests the film serves. How does one measure the value of seeing the human, middle-class side of Arabs on the Israeli side of the Green Line against the film’s avoidance of the poverty on the other side?
Whether intentional or not, “Pickles, Inc.” opens a door into Israeli politics and the politics of representation. The questions it raises about how to understand people across borders and what is at stake in doing so are critical in the current struggle in and around Israel. Though the film’s creative choices do not necessitate engaging with the political situation, they certainly allow the curious viewer a way into the storm.
