Life Sentences, the award winning Israeli film, premiered in America the week of November 6 as part of the Other Israel Film Festival. Winner of the Van Leer Group Foundation Award for Best Documentary Film at the Jerusalem Film Festival in 2013, and directed by Nurit Kedar and Yaron Shani, the documentary explores the life of the children of Fawzi al Nimer. Fawzi Al Nimer committed 22 terrorist attacks against the State of Israel until his arrest and subsequent sentencing to 27 life sentences in prison. It is not until the Jibril Agreement of 1985, when the Israeli government released 1,150 prisoners in exchange for three Israeli soldiers, that Fauzi’s life sentence came to an abrupt halt.
But his imprisonment does not. As his son Nimer points out, Fawzi moves from one prison to the next as his life continues. He ends up living in Gaza, which according to his son is just another sort of prison, finally living out the end of his days in imprisonment within his own body, when he is unable to recognize his own son or move about on his own. His life sentence never truly ends, and neither does the life his son is sentenced to as a result of his father’s actions. The real imprisonment the documentary explores is that of Fawzi’s son, Nimer.
Nimer is a man of many names. He is known as Nimer in Arab circles. But Nimer’s mother is a Jew, and so in Jewish circles, Nimer goes by Momi, short for Shlomo. His mother fell in love with Fawzi al Nimer when they were young. They married, and all the while she did not know the acts he was committing. His arrest ended their marriage, but not their love. Nimer claims that there were times his mother was crying, and he and his sister knew it was because she still loves his father. Arab relatives claim that Fawzi still loves his ex-wife.
In front of the camera, he is Nimer, yet he speaks in Hebrew, slowly and thoughtfully. He is a man with a lot of weight on his shoulders. He was been down the path of drugs and back; he has lived with his mother in the ultra-Orthodox community of Montreal; he has visited his sister, now Ultra-Orthodox too, in Jerusalem.
And he has remained a conflicted conflation and amalgamation of identity. He grew up in Israel wondering: if Arabs are the enemy, where does that place him? He lied and pretended his father was a Jewish hero of war, a soldier who died at battle, rather than a PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) member, friends with Yasser Arafat and revered in the Arab world. Nimer is considered Jewish in the Jewish world where matrilineal descent is authoritative, and Arab in the Arab world where religion is determined by the father.
He is a man always trying to escape his confusing genealogy, trying to escape from the Arab wife, Hadil, he married, one of his first cousins he met when he visited his father’s family in Acre. She is his anchor and his prison. He is always flying, running away, seeing airports as doors to freedom. Yet his family is his family for life, as the Hebrew name of the film, Mishpatai Chaim, points out. The name means both life sentences and family for life. Despite how much Nimer wants to escape his heritage, he cannot.
The documentary takes us to recent years, when Nimer watches Hamas shatter rockets on his mother in Ashdod, while Israel is bombing his father in Gaza. Fawzi al Nimer passed in 2013, but the film’s story is that of Nimer Ahmed, his wife, his two Arab children, and his desire to just take a break from the old pictures he sorts through at the movie’s opening, from his mixed heritage, and from a life that has very much been lived out in the in-between.
The movie oscillates between close up shots of Nimer as he sits in front of the camera, to shots of Nimer revisiting the old places he grew up. He prays in his old Ultra-Orthodox Yeshiva, and he visits his old boarding school. The memories are very much present for him as he wanders these old haunts. By the end of the film, we feel that we know Nimer as a character, and that we have truly explored the ramifications of a father’s actions on his son. Life Sentences gives a character sketch of a man haunted by someone else’s past, and his search for stability. Although Nimer’s mother and sister did not give permission to be represented in the movie, and their faces are blacked out in photographs, the movie does not take a side. It illustrates the conflict from an unbiased, middle perspective, though the voice of a man who knows both worlds too well.
Yael Roberts is a recent graduate of Stern College now studying at the Pardes Institute in Jerusalem.
