New York Dispatch. 2.

The Tribeca Film Festival is not a showcase for motivational films, unless either you're Christo (who'll watch a 15-minute preview of Albert Maysles's The Gates) or you're in the real estate business (values of property have soared in lower Manhattan since the festival was started to breathe financial life into what was thought to be a dead area). Still, even in a festival where one of the most anticipated films is a documentary about jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, there is some room for hope, even the limited hope for moving toward peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Encounter Point, directed by Ronit Avni (and co-directed by Julia Bacha), places its hope for peace, or at least understanding, on the growing population of Israelis and Palestinians who might be expected to be the most hell-bent on revenge - the parents and families of victims of terrorism or random shootings on both sides. To meet these families is to hear withering stories of grief. The daughter of a Bethlehem politician heading to the supermarket with his entire family is shot by Israeli soldiers who say that they were waiting for three suspects driving the same color car. The student daughter of a burly IDF veteran dies in a street bombing in Tel Aviv. A young man from Ramallah is crippled by after being shot in the leg by a settler. Young men in the same room with him tell similar stories. It could be a recruiting meeting for extremists.

Robi Damelin's son, David, a soldier, is shot and killed by a sniper while posted on the West Bank. That killing, at a checkpoint near a settlement, made the sniper a folk hero among Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. Along with other aggrieved parents, Damelin founds the Bereaved Families Supporting Peace, Reconciliation and Tolerance, a group sworn to non-violence. "What do you do with the pain?" she asks. Damelin's Palestinian counterpart is Ali Abu Awwad, whose brother was killed by an Israeli soldier.

Both sides know the odds they face. Jews who seek dialogue are viewed with incredulity by fellow Israelis who want revenge. Palestinians, especially those with wounds from Israeli gunfire, view Ali's initiative as a betrayal, and betrayal in the Occupied Territories can earn savage  punishment. Remember the scene in Paradise Now, in which would-be bombers filming themselves are told that filmed assassinations of collaborators are popular souvenirs.

In Encounter Point, the meetings of Jews and Arabs who barely spoke to each other before are as poignant as their testimony of the losses that brought them to that point, yet some of the film's telling moments come during a visit by Jews in the Bereaved Families to a settlement in Gaza, a visit hosted by settlers. Settlers dig in their heels, impatient with any mention of Palestinian mistreatment and humiliation, and point out that Arabs under Israeli occupation have higher living standards than in most Arab countries, to which Damelin counters that South Africans offered the same defense of their treatment of Blacks under apartheid - a valid point, but not one that extends a conversation, at least not with the Gaza settlers. You leave this film with a sense of the huge labor it took to bring aggrieved Israelis and Palestinians together, just to talk to each other, and the even greater labor involved in getting Israelis to agree that one way toward peace is a dialogue based on a shared sense of loss. The families, now numbering 500, seem determined enough, although perhaps their best hope for now is a sequel with an expanded cast a year or two down the line. The fact that the Israeli bereaved families demonstrate with signs on the street points to how marginal they are politically.

A chillier feeling comes from Dear Father, Quiet, We're Shooting, directed by David Benchetrit, another Israeli doc about opposition, this time from veterans who either served or refused to serve in the occupied territories. Conscientious objectors, including a former helicopter pilot and a former tank commander, are eloquent as they argue that the 1982 invasion of Lebanon was the pivotal time that hardened the Israeli military. For these veterans, some of them iconic macho guys who certainly don't call themselves pacifists, the 18-year mission was Israel's "Vietnam," with the bombing of cities, civilian deaths, and "targeted assassinations." Step back for a moment and avoid evaluating the "Vietnam" allusion too literally. Think of it, among other things, as an intensification of existing feuds in a Lebanon that was already ravaged by violence, and as a reflection of collapsing morale, painful divisions, and (to understate it) delayed accountability in Israeli society. Aerial footage of bombings and black and white shots of civilians seeking shelter in ruins give the Vietnam epithet some plausibility. So do orders to "shoot anything that moves" in cities that the Israelis know to be full of civilians. The very title of the film seems to be implying a question from an earlier generation asking what happened to the Israel they knew. Now we see.

For Americans, the look of the film will be familiar, with footage of a chaotic war intercut with scenes of testimony from veterans who say they regret what they did, while describing what they did in painful detail. Here some of the testimony is slightly different. Young men who served stress that it's not enough to deplore the excesses of war after serving bravely - you could  call it the old John Kerry standard. They argue, instead, that the test of courage doesn't come on the battlefield (in calling for peace after one earns one's stripes as a killer), but in the refusal to serve in the occupied territories at all. The trial of a few young men who do just that is shown. A new line of conflict seems to be drawn, although these protesters, like the bereaved families, are a tiny group.

These dissenters and objectors are all men. The more general experience of girls in uniform is also the subject of the fictional Close to Home, set in Jerusalem and seen from the perspective of girl soldiers, a first for an Israeli feature. That novelty may be one reason for its appeal at festivals like the Berlinale, where I saw it and wrote about it. (We are indeed talking about girls. The conscripts are teenagers, who are as bored and peevish as teenagers or soldiers can be.) Close to Home takes us through ordinary days in these soldiers' lives, i.e., checking identity papers of Arabs on the street at random and taking abuse from their sergeants. There's not much nobility here. Nor is there much beauty in the Jerusalem where they practice racial-profiling every day.

The soldiers whom we follow are Mirit, a sullen pretty martinet whose parents live nearby, and Smadar, a malcontent who can't find a rule that isn't meant to be broken, whether it's smoking on duty or shoplifting with a guy that she picks up on a lark. "Maybe I don't know what an Arab looks like," Smadar retorts when superiors question the log of Palestinians whose papers she checked. The petty annoyances of army life blend in with the petty humiliation of Palestinians under occupation, which become a displaced revenge for the girls who hate military service. Then, when the two girls quarrel over something meaningless, a bomb goes off.

There's nothing too special in the look of Close to Home, unless you appreciate the palette of wintry Jerusalem grey experienced by the lowest rank of girl soldiers. Yet the directors have a flair for dramatizing the subtle modulations of everyday army life and everyday teenage angst. If you've been in or around the military outside of combat, you know that life consists of long periods of boredom punctuated by rare moments of intensity. Add young crushes and young rivalries to that mix, in the context of two communities that view each other with supreme suspicion, and you've got a sense of where this is going.

(While Close to Home did break ground as a portrait of army life for young women, the army is as much a part of Israel cinema as it is a part of Israeli society. For another take on the bonding of two soldiers, this time a gay commander and his handsome lover in an outpost cut into a hillside in the Golan Heights, watch Yossi & Jagger, Israel's Brokeback Bunker.)

Posted by dwhudson at April 29, 2006 3:51 PM