Film festival focuses on Israel’s minority populations
For the fifth consecutive year, Manhattan’s Jewish Community Center hosted the Other Israel Film Festival. A project devoted to exposing issues facing Israeli minorities, the festival brought together directors and films from Nov. 10-17 to “foster social awareness and cultural understanding,” according to the festival’s website. The festival included two Palestinian filmmakers this year. “We are constantly expanding and including other minority populations,” Isaac Zablocki, the JCC’s director of film programs, wrote in an e-mail. The films shown at the festival represent the identities of many of contemporary’s Israel’s disenfranchised communities.
Last year, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) advised “conscientious filmmakers not to participate in this festival,” according to a release on its website. The organization’s concerns included allegedly propagandistic wording in official OIFF statements and “whitewashing” of what they call Apartheid-like practices in Israel.
“This year has been quiet from the PACBI side,” Zablocki said. Only one filmmaker boycotted the festival.
“We are only [biased] towards good films. We are not afraid of showing things that challenge the Jewish community and we are not afraid of celebrating Israel. We have a very specific mission to show minority life within Israeli society,” Zablocki wrote. “We had minimal backlash from the Jewish community. The usual few crazies,” he added.
The festival opened with “Dolphin Boy,” a documentary chronicling the life of an Arab teen named Morad. Brutally beaten by his classmates, his trauma was so severe that he remained mute for months. Desperate to get his son back, his father takes him to Eilat, where Morad works with dolphin trainers and befriends the sea mammals. This juxtaposition of violence and healing recurred throughout the film.
“Dolphin Boy” demonstrates the personal destruction violence can have on life. “I mean it when I say, ‘Look how vulnerable we are,’” says trauma psychiatrist Dr. Ilan Kutz, who treats Morad in the film. It also documents the healing which nature can bring to that same person. Working with dolphins helped transform Morad into a fully active young man and has proven to be helpful for the damaged and healthy alike. “It’s really an ‘E.T.’ kind of phenomenon,” Kutz adds.
The film largely avoids explicit mentions of ethnic tensions in favor of emphasizing the story’s universality. “There is always an Arab-Israeli context in Israel,” Judith Manassen-Ramon, the film’s producer, said in a post-screening panel. “But the avoidance of the subject was on purpose because it’s a human story, though it is located in the Middle East and in Israel. It’s a story between a father and a son, a doctor and patient, a man and an animal, and that was the emphasis of the story and all the rest around it is what each and every viewer brings to the story, from his own world.”
Another standout was “77 Steps,” directed by Ibtisam Mara’ana, an Israeli Arab. The title refers to the number of stairs one must climb to reach Ibtisam’s parents’ house: an apt title, as the film chronicles her journey towards independence and self-awareness.
“77 Steps” follows Ibtisam’s relationship with a Jew in Tel Aviv, Jonathan, and her struggles with her identity as a woman in a patriarchal society, and as an Arab in a Jewish-dominated culture. When Ibtisam got involved with the Meretz, a liberal Israeli political party, she wanted to address women’s issues in Palestinian society. But when Meretz openly supported the 2009 war against Gaza, she backed out. “This is also my identity, to be Palestinian, and, individually, I am against war,” she said in an interview.
For Ibtisam, “77 Steps” served as a platform to express problems facing both Arabs and Muslim women. She faced opposition from Jonathan’s family because she was Muslim, dealing with those problems onscreen. “But, for me, this is to expose myself [in] a personal film. This is the best way to deal with my problems, my conflict between myself and between my community, Arab society, and between [the] Israeli state and, through films [that are] personal, I really can understand the whole picture,” she observed. She also serves as a trailblazer for other Muslim women. “I think that this is our opportunity as women to make changes in the world and I all the time [am] trying to talk about that,” she said.
While “77 Steps” dramatically documents interreligious and racial issues, “HaMisrad,” the Israeli adaptation of “The Office”, does so the same with humor. Dvir Benedek stars as Avi Meshulam. Like our own Michael Scott, Meshulam is the arrogant and oblivious boss of the eponymous office. His staff is a microcosm of Israel’s diversity. Each character represents a broader national and societal stereotype, including an Israeli Russian, an Israeli Arab, a gay character and an Orthodox Jew. “I think it’s much more critical than the original,” said director Eitan Tzur in a discussion after a screening of the show. “It’s less general themes about small, the little people. It’s also like this, but then the writer, Uzi [Weill], looked inside the microcosms of the Israel society.”
Each office worker demonstrates laughable flaws, poking fun at the conventions and stereotypes of the group they represent. The Orthodox Leah is constantly pregnant, while Avi’s hyper-paranoid number two, Yariv, claims he belonged to a super-secret intelligence unit when he was in the army.
Tzur has witnessed such polarized elements within Israel. “The, I became sad because I felt that, within the last year, Israel [has] become more and more like ‘The Office,’” he recalled of watching reruns.
Director Sigal Emanuel cast a light on the plight of poor and homeless youth in Israel in “A Place of Her Own.” The film follows Reut, who runs away from an abusive adoptive family at age 11, is shuttled between institutions, eventually becoming a drug dealer in Jerusalem. There, she gets pregnant at 17, but Israeli Social Services takes her son away from her. In her search to find “a place of her own,” Reut, a Jew, marries a Palestinian man before her life spirals out of control.
In Reut’s young life, it is rare to find a friend who doesn’t want to take advantage of her. As an infant, Reut was taken from her mother and given to an abusive adoptive family. According to Sigal, that event precipitated Reut’s misfortune for the rest of her life, including having her son taken. “All her relationship[s] with people, as I told you before, was based on interest,” Sigal said in an interview. “Everyone in [Reut’s] life want from her something. It’s sad to say that, but, unfortunately, this is what the truth [is].” Once she is living with her husband, Jalil, the writing for Reut’s painful fate is on the wall. Jalil keeps her isolated and constantly pregnant while living in poverty.
“A Place of Her Own” explains the hazards of the Israeli welfare system and the negative effects it can have on those it tries to help. Sigal encouraged Israeli Social Services to be more proactive in checking its adoptive families’ backgrounds. “First of all, as a worker’s service, you need to see, you need to take a smart decision not to send a child to adoptive family that they are not have the right to raise a children,” she said. Viewers can help those like Reut by simply reaching out to those in need. “If you see child in the street, homeless, you can ask him if he need[s] help and to be more involved, just to be more patient, to be more sensitive to the community,” she added.
In contrast, the mini-series “The Promise,” the first episode of which was shown at the festival, concentrated on a foreign and historical perspective. The drama follows the parallel storylines of Len, a British soldier stationed in the British Mandate of Palestine at the end of World War II, and Erin, a British girl visiting modern-day Israel. This perspective is an unusual one and offers both a slightly removed—in Len’s case—and more immediate lens—in Erin’s case—from which to view the Middle East. “The Promise” examines history and concepts of justice in two eras of Israeli history. Len and Erin’s stories intertwine seamlessly to reveal that the conflict in Israel is hardly black-and-white.
“Clearly, I’m sure you can tell, it’s very much a British perspective,” said producer David Aukin in a session after the screening. “It is the story of the how British—a post-colonial story of the dissolution of the British Empire. In that period, there were the three ‘I’s, Ireland, India, and Israel, and we left messes wherever we were and left it.” Unlike other films at the festival, “The Promise” is also pure fiction, though strongly based in fact. “We’re not giving you an essay. We’re not making a propaganda film,” added Aukin. “We’re telling a drama with real characters working out real stories.”
Carly Silver is a senior at Barnard College, Columbia University, majoring in religion and minoring in ancient studies. Originally from Weston, Conn., she is currently trying to pay for college by playing the ponies at a Tri-State area racetrack. She is a New Voices Magazine national correspondent.
