Haifa Dispatch. 1.

The real strengths of the Haifa International Film Festival this year have been the new documentaries from Israel. I'll be looking at them in two reports.

In Flipping Out, the new documentary by Yoav Shamir, which made its debut in Haifa, we look at a phenomenon that has been a preoccupation of Israelis for some time. After Israeli soldiers complete their military service - two years for women, three years for men - many of them go to India to recover from the army experience, an experience that can often involve restraining a hostile Palestinian population in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and Gaza. The title refers to the hashish, LSD, ecstasy and other drugs taken by these ex-soldiers, and to the sometimes-disastrous effects that the substances have. Throughout the film, we see young Israelis smoking hash in what sure looks like huge quantities, in the northern region of Kashmir and in Goa. It's no secret that Israelis journey in great numbers to India after military service in the hope of forgetting what they've been through. (A lot are also going to South America, where Israelis are opening guest houses and trying to keep their fellow veterans from "flipping out on mind-altering substances there.") It will surprise many Israelis that so many former soldiers turn to drugs to get "back to normal."

You laugh when a young girl, just out of the army and in a deep stupor, tells a visiting Israeli Deputy Prime Minister that what she's doing in India is normal, compared to what she did in her country's armed forces. You also laugh to see that the politician does not seem surprised to be hearing this. The same politician listens patiently as another former soldier sings an inane but heartfelt song with his guitar in a grove of trees in Goa. If the exodus to India and to drugs weren't a crisis, or a potential one, an Israeli politician wouldn't be wasting his time on these stoned kids.

Yoav Shamir made a splash on the festival circuit in 2003 with Checkpoint, a documentary which looked at an institution in Israeli life, the checkpoints that Palestinians must pass through to enter Israel, or to pass through occupied territory on the way to other Palestinian land. Crossing tends to be long, arduous and humiliating. Shamir watched it all, as if he were observing the process through a surveillance camera. There were no crescendos in the film, just the slow everyday process that made daily life a torture.

Shamir followed that film with 5 Days, an ambitious documentary that he shot in multiple places with multiple cameras - the subject was the five-day withdrawal of Israeli troops and settlers (most, but not all of them) from the Gaza Strip in 2005. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) go easier on the settlers there than on the Palestinians in Checkpoint. 5 Days showed how messy policymaking is, and how much messier enforcing a policy in the ground can be.

Flipping Out follows Israelis who have given themselves the mission of keeping the young veterans in India from going off the deep end with drugs. In Northern India, a young religious man, with black hat and tefillin, operates a Chabad (Orthodox) House and keeps a close watch on former soldiers who seem to smoke hash all day. He knows his clients. Just a few years before, he was one of them, although he acknowledges that there are so many Israeli ex-soldiers that some just "disappear."

In Goa, which for the last 40 years has been a heroin-strewn playground for travelers from the West, a former Israeli secret service office who looks like a hippie gone to seed does reconnaissance, searching for the young who wander away. He also makes "interventions" when necessary. We watch one of them - he tracks down a former soldier who makes deals to buy land and hires workers without the money to pay for any of it. As our agent is driving the young man away, preparing to put him on a plane back to Israel, the ex-soldier threatens to bring in "the president of the United States." To be fair, more than a few Israeli leaders have made that threat in the past, under different circumstances. Maybe the apple never really falls too far from the tree.

Things could be worse. Although drug use on active duty is not addressed, it does not seem to be the serious problem for the IDF that it was for the US during the Vietnam War.

Shamir's film is a loose travelogue, with occasional footage of soldiers dodging bullets and rocks on the West Bank to remind viewers of what the young men and women are fleeing. Once in Goa, he mixes in shots of throbbing all-night raves to remind Israelis of what they may face when the kids come home. The ex-soldiers don't seem to mind that he's filming. Not much bothers them.

Flipping Out is sure to be a fixture on the Jewish film festival circuit. The subject will inevitably give it a wider reach. Israelis with whom I spoke tended to agree that the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza had a corrosive effect on the Israelis enforcing it, to say nothing of the effect on the Palestinians who have to endure it.

No Place for a Lady, directed by Tamar Yarom, looks at the experience of the occupation from the perspective of female soldiers. We hear from a medic, who began her service with high ideals, and then talks about posing for a picture next to the corpse of a Palestinian with an erection. She talks of cleaning up bodies of Arabs killed by Israelis before those bodies were returned to the Palestinian authority.

Another woman recalls serving as an observer, watching an Arab village from a safe distance through a telescopic lens and then calling in troops on the ground. A third woman served at a checkpoint, and remembers making women strip for searches. It's the kind of work that makes you want to go to India for a long time.

Yet this isn't Abu Ghraib, in spite of the testimony about the photograph with the dead man's erection. There seems to have been a frat boy atmosphere among soldiers in the territories, which pressured girls to behave like boys. It's not the kind of atmosphere that encourages compassion for the enemy. As compelling as the testimony in No Place for a Lady might be, you get a sense that much is missing. Did women interrogate prisoners? Was the interaction between men and women soldiers always so friendly? Somehow you end up thinking that the story of women soldiers in the territories is richer and grimmer than even these grim recollections on the screen.

Posted by dwhudson at October 4, 2007 7:29 AM