Jerusalem Film Festival & Ramallah, part 1
images from Bil'in Habtiti (2006) and Promises (2000)by Ludmila Cvikova
Taxi driver Arriving at Tel Aviv airport on a hot Saturday afternoon in July 2006, it was a pleasant surprise that there was indeed someone waiting for me with a board with my name on it. It was the Sabbath but the festival life goes on. On the way to Jerusalem, I found out that the someone in question was a hired taxi driver who knew nothing about the festival or films. He did however welcome me to Israel and gave be an immediate introductory lesson on one of the hottest issues of the country: “Is this....the WALL?” I asked him as we passed an endless and high concrete fence.
Yes, it was the wall and he – as an old Jerusalem inhabitant – was entirely against it, was his explanation. Separating walls are not so shocking for me: after all, I lived for 28 years behind one that is known in people’s collective memory as the Berlin Wall; I was on the wrong side at the time. Actually, it marked my entire live as they started to build it in the year and even the month of my birth. My native Czechoslovakia was separated from Austria on its southern side: by kilometres of barbed and electrified wires, hundreds or thousands of soldiers and as many dogs. My paranoid mind (communist youth has left some traces) first thought that this “sightseeing” trip by the taxi driver must be some sort of provocation but when I found out wasn’t, I greedily took my HandyCam from my bag and started shooting. Welcome to Israel: land filled with walls and fences, land of friendly and also various people of all nationalities, land of a lot of resistance against all kind of injustice and the most complicated political situation that I’ve ever experienced.
Old friends It’s only five minutes from my hotel to the
Cinematheque, the heart of the festival, and on my way there I saw another long snake-like landmark further away, a part of the wall on the opposite hill. I was going to meet Hana Lasman, my Israeli friend, cultural worker and mother of the twins Daniel and Yarko (pictured left on the poster image with Falaj ) who were the main protagonists of the documentary
Promises, a film that won the IFFR Audience Award in 2001. We met a few months later after the festival in my flat in Amsterdam, when they were flying over to Los Angeles, as the film was nominated for the Oscar in the documentary category. It’s been five years since and I am curious to know whether and how the boys have changed. However, it was not yet clear that we could all meet in person now that both of them were in military service. Hana (or Hanka, the Slavic form of the nickname I gave her) sat on the terrace with Daniel who was on leave. Yarko could not make it, next Sabbath maybe? Our meeting felt the way it always does with good friends: as if we had seen each other only yesterday.
B.Z.Goldberg (left on portrait), who directed
Promises along with
Justine Shapiro and Carlos Bolado, joined us only a few days later as he came back to Israel from his last shoot. My entire visit to Israel was accompanied by surprising meetings, old and new, and hospitality and friendliness, even though the political atmosphere was tense because of the Israeli soldiers kidnapped in the Gaza strip. And: before we realised it, because of another conflict that started on 12 July, four days after my arrival: the one between Israel and Hezbollah.
Going to movies 
My favourite places for screenings became the Beit Shmuel and the Begin Centre. In the Cinematheque I mostly had appointments and lunches on its terrace.
It seemed like good timing as within four days I managed to see the strongest documentaries that later, after my return to the Netherlands and after reading the article by
Howard Feinstein, film critic and one of the jurors (
read Feinstein's IndieWire report), turned out to be prize winners. It started with
Fence, Wall Border (picture), the last part of the trilogy by
Eli Cohen, an Israeli film maker who received the Achievement Award of the Jerusalem Film Festival this year. The director told me that the trilogy showed the history of the walls and fences in Israel, not only the last one that is in its last part. It made me curious to see them all so I asked him to send us screeners. It seemed like the subject was inseparable from life and art in Israel and it returns many times in Israeli documentaries (and I’m sure in the Palestinian ones as well but those I haven’t seen... as yet).
Unfortunately, I missed the screening of
The Hothouse by
Shimon Dotan that was later much talked about, but I did see the premieres of
9 Star Hotel (picture) by
Ido Haar and
Bil’in Habibti by
Shai Carmeli Pollak. The former is an intimate portrait of a group of Palestinian young men who have to earn their money clandestinely, by building houses for Canadian settlers. The director managed to win over their trust and followed them day and night, revealing the closest and intimate details of their shabby life with no future.
Bil'in Habibti (picture left) shows the brave and consistent resistance by inhabitants of the village Bil’in Habibti and their national and international supporters who all fight against the construction of the wall there. The director protests with them, holds the camera and gets into heated situations. Both premieres were surprising and emotional. At the end of the films we experienced a sudden upcoming of the characters and their emotional presence on the stage.
During both evenings I personally experienced a new discovery: hundreds of people in the audience, all of them Israelis, gave standing ovations to the film crews and above all the Palestinian people present. What a powerful experience! I hope we can repeat it in Rotterdam in a few months, during our festival. Who knows, some dreams do come true. On the other hand, another question did not let me go before I found an answer to it. “How come these kinds of films can be shown during this official festival? Is there no censorship to stop them?”
No, is the answer by the programme director of the festival
Avinoam Harpak, longtime friend of the Rotterdam festival. There is not only no censorship, many of the films also are shown on a local TV channel. And he must know as he says there were 130 documentary entries and only 14 of them were selected by the selection committee.
Before my visit to Israel, I read a small book introducing me to the culture. A book comprising facts from the present and history. That taught me about the immigrant waves to the country, known as
aliyahs. The last and largest one was the Russian wave in the early 1990s. Indeed, I can easily and comfortably use my Russian in many cases when my English doesn’t help me out. Immigrants and their emotional start in the country were also the subject of the documentary
A Hebrew Lesson (picture) by
David Ofek & Rotem Ron – a humorous, smart and exciting mosaic of a mixture of immigrants with various nationalities, as well as their teacher. A film that got under the skin of its participants as well as that of the audience. One of those whose characters don’t let you go even days after you have seen it and actually you don’t want them to leave.
(
to be continued, see part 2)