Israel @ 60. Another dispatch.

Two years ago, the head of one of the studios' independent divisions, in response to a question about whether he was interested in distributing Israeli films, said, "Why is it that Jews can make great films in every country of the world, except Israel?" And he was Jewish.

By now, he should know better, but these things take time with executives. The range of dramatic features is broad and getting broader for a country of Israel's size, where filmmakers, to their credit, do not always meet expectations that their films will be the roadmaps to resolving or understanding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (which the "roadmaps" toward peace have not been.)

Documentaries from Israel have been a long march of critical films about war and other government policies, particularly the treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories, and the treatment of women in ultra-orthodox communities. A new film by Yoav Shamir (represented at the Israel @ 60 series by Checkpoint, a documentary that's true to its title in its long shots of encounters between Israeli soldiers and Palestinians trying to pass through checkpoints to accomplish the most ordinary of tasks) is Flipping Out, a look at Israeli kids, just out of the army, who de-compress in India, by the thousands, with all kinds of drugs. Like a lot of the Israeli documentaries, it may be the kind of film about things that the government would rather that you not see, but the government's film fund paid for the film nonetheless.

It's a credit to what is happening in Israeli film these days that the series at Lincoln Center is not complete in any sense. Yet it is a taste that could give you a taste for more. One of my favorites is Late Marriage, by Dover Koshashvili, whose name indicates that his story might deal with Georgian Jews who emigrated from the former Soviet Union to Israel. Bear in mind that Israeli cinema deals with a near-endless variety of immigrant experiences, which now includes the stories of non-Jewish workers who perform much of the unskilled labor that Palestinians did before restrictions kept many of them out of the country.

In this deadpan family comedy, Lior Ashkenazi plays Zaza, who at 31 is pursuing his doctorate in philosophy, which could prepare him for a low-paying academic job, if he finds one. He is living off his parents, who are taking him around to meet eligible women. Played by Ashkenazi as an Israeli Steve Carrell, Zaza shows little interest in the stunning young Georgian girl, while his parents and her parents go through the choreographed traditional matchmaking motions. The ensemble scenes are as wildly satirical as those of any recent film about parents doing everything wrong for their children. Things get worse when they learn that Zaza has a lover, three years older who is divorced with a child. Don't look for a happy ending here, or even for an ending that shows that a character gaining a bit of wisdom. In this version of The Tender Trap, tradition trumps tenderness.

No. 17, by David Ofek, is the anatomy of the investigation of a terrorist attack. In this case, they're not looking for the bomber (or the background of the bomber) who detonates explosives on a bus from Tel Aviv heading to the city of Tiberias. The mission that the filmmakers give themselves is identifying the person who ends up headless and in shreds.

The search reconstructs the bus trip, and takes us through Israel today. The assumption is that the dead man (it's assumed that he was a man) was one of many thousands of illegal immigrants working in Israel, and probes its way among Rumanians, Africans and Indians. With police and a born-again sketch artist, a profile of the dead man emerges. Finally he is determined to be from a family of Moroccan immigrants in the town of Sderot, a petty criminal who lived off little scams. His family is the victim of another scam - local crooks extort money from them, promising that they can find their son alive.

Ofek's documentary is restrained and understated, typical of a country that has known everyday violence of this kind for a long time. What stirs emotions among those interviewed in Ofek's reconstruction of the attack is the sense of dread that a man died alone and anonymous. What is missing is any sense of revenge for such an act.

But that doesn't mean there's no longer any taste for vengeance in Israeli society. In Avenge But One of My Two Eyes, the cantankerous Avi Mograbi examines the purposeful teaching of the Samson story, in which the Jewish hero, blinded by the Philistines (the same word for Palestinians), gives rise to a cri de coeur from young Israelis for revenge. In other scenes, young tourists visiting Masada, where Jewish warriors died fighting the Romans, shout from the hilltops that they will never surrender. From these scenes, Mograbi shifts to moments of indifference, in which Israeli soldiers hold Arabs back from crossing roads and try to prevent Mograbi from filming it all. Another narrative line has Mograbi on camera, on the telephone, talking to an Arab friend who believes that death is preferable to the humiliation that Arabs endure, concluding that young people who choose not to live might be the very ones who chose to kill others on the way out. Mograbi dedicates the film to his son, who no doubt will live with the effects of what his father has observed.

I spoke with Mograbi back in 2005 when Avenge But One of My Two Eyes played at the New York Film Festival.

- David D'Arcy

Posted by dwhudson at June 2, 2008 4:07 AM