Lebanon

Movie Reviews: “Lebanon” and more at the Haifa Film Festival 2009

A major event at Haifa had nothing to do with the festivals competitions. It was the screening of the new Israeli feature,  Lebanon.  It was not the official Israeli opening of the film, which had played already in theaters in order to qualify for an Oscar nomination (which went instead to Ajami, a collaboration by two directors, one Jew and one Arab, about Arab street kids in Jaffa – and the official premiere of Lebanon was two nights after the Haifa screening, in Tel Aviv. Try to figure that one out.

If you havent read enough about Lebanon already, the film (which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and played at festivals in Toronto and New York) is based on the wartime confusion and trauma of its director, Samuel Maoz, now 47, who was in a tank unit in the 1982 Israeli invasion. Apart from a book-ended beginning and end in a field of sunflowers, the entire film takes place within a tank, where young men see the enemy through a mechanical viewfinder and end up shooting practically anything thats in front of them.   If last years animated memoir Waltz with Bashir hadnt convinced you that the Israeli invasion of Lebanon was a futile act that damaged a generation, Lebanon probably will.

Lebanon

Lebanon

For Moaz, the director, making the film was an act of exorcism. When I spoke to him on the evening of the screening, he said that his most intense memory of that war was the smell of burning flesh inside the tank. – and this despite the overwhelming grinding noise in the tank interior that substitutes for a soundtrack.  Once the film was made, Moaz said, that smell went away. Whe youre watching the film of untrained young men sweating together in a death machine, the most immediate sensation is tactile. It is now 27 years since Israel invaded.  The experience made Moaz a pacifist. This film could push some spectators in that direction.

The response from the Israeli audience in Haifa seemed weak from a hometown public for a film that had just won a major international award. In fact, the audience wasnt unappreciative — it had been stunned by the experience.  Its the closest Ive seen to shell-shock in an audience. If a realistic film about a demoralized tank unit werent enough, protests in East Jerusalem and on the West Bank suggest that the country could be on its way to a Third Intifada, a new war with Palestinians in the territories that Israel occupies.

Lebanon

Lebanon

Israel isnt the first place where people look for comedy, although The Bands Visit (2007) had plenty of quiet laughs in its story of an Egyptian band that takes the wrong bus from the airport and arrives at a bleak new Israeli town in the middle of nowhere.  A Matter of Size, about fat Israelis who overcome anxieties about their weight through sumo wrestling, won this springs audience award at Tribeca.

A Matter of Size

A Matter of Size

Two new ideas for comedies were pitched to producers who visited Haifa for an annual meeting to audition projects. Single Plus puts a caustic twist on the Jewish mother story. The mother of a thirty-ish single woman is stricken with cancer and refuses to take her medicine until her unmarried daughter becomes pregnant.  Try that guilt on for size. Of course, the daughter complies, but I wont give details away. No word yet on when shooting starts. The director is Dover Koshashvili, who made Late Marriage (2001), a poker-faced comedy about a son of Georgian immigrants who cant find a prospective bride to meet his parents approval.

In another work-not-yet-in-progress, Kosher Swine Flu – nothing if not a great title – Israel is in a frenzy as a swine flu epidemic takes hold of the country. The only way out for Israelis who can afford to bribe their way to safety is through Gaza – from hell to the apocalypse, some might say. And this is a comedy, although the script is yet to come from Basil Khalil, a Palestinian writer/director living in London. Just my kind of humor. Im looking forward to it, although swine flu may the least of Israels worries by the time the film reaches an audience.