Amsterdam Dispatch. 2.

For all the bias that some Israelis say their country endures from the international press, Israeli documentaries are well-represented in international documentary festivals such as IDFA, which ended Sunday. The conventional wisdom is that the conflict and stress of the Middle East produce great stories and great films - it's the old "in conflict there is drama" theory, care of George Bernard Shaw. The truth is more banal. Israel and Palestine and the greater region produce great stories, but every region does. The reason that there are so many Israeli documentaries circulating internationally is that private television stations pay a tax, which is directed toward financing films. In money, there is cinema.

My First War, directed by Yariv Mozer (which premiered at DocAviv last spring), is a soldier's record of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon of 2006, in which Israel was mobilized to eliminate the threat from rockets launched across the border from Lebanon, and to recover a kidnapped soldier. The rockets have stopped now, although the soldier is still in enemy hands, and Israel staggered back after losing troops and losing its credibility to Hezbullah.

Mozer, then 28, was mobilized, and documented his unit's activities. These were not young conscripts, but adults who are anything but carried away by the romance of a new experience. They are now fighting a war whose objectives they don't understand. The tactics of fighting that war are also a mystery.

The camera follows soldiers who are appalled by failures of command that do more than create confusion - they end up killing troops when Israeli vehicles are made easy targets. Mozer's immediate commander, Elon Levi, is a charismatic young colonel who looks a bit like a dark Sean Penn. He can't understand why his soldiers are being put in harm's way. The soldiers, most of them with families, are demoralized, and they say so in Mozer's simply crafted home movie.

Raw as it may be, My First War has parallels with a classic like Kippur, Amos Gitai's drama about reservists rushing off to defend their country from ambush on several sides in 1973, and sputtering in disorganization. At least Israel won that war, although you wouldn't know it from Gitai's final shot of a helicopter hovering over a land that military vehicles have crisscrossed like hot rakes. Some Holy Land.

You see the lush green Galilee in My First War ravaged by the military columns that pass through it. You also see tanks shooting aimlessly into the distance, which call to mind scenes from Waltz with Bachir, Ari Folman's animated memoir of the Lebanon invasion of 1982, to be released by Sony Picture Classics on December 25. In Folman's hallucinatory account of his time during that invasion, one of the precise memories is that of racing through orchards on vehicles and shooting indiscriminately into the trees on both sides. Those orchards are in Israel near the border with Lebanon in My First War, but soldiers still talk of firing senselessly around them, for want of any direction. (Not so different from the way that John Kerry spoke of free-fire zones in the Mekong Delta when he was in Vietnam.) Israel finally retreated from Lebanon that summer, after destroying much of Lebanon's infrastructure and the reputation of the Israeli Defense Forces as an invincible army. The next crisis will be a measure of the price Israel paid for the 2006 fiasco.

If the newcomer Yariv Mozer is heartfelt in a straightforward way, Avi Mograbi is anything but that in Z32, his musical inquiry/dialogue into the killing of Palestinian policemen by a veteran of an elite brigade. The crime in question was the deliberate and unprovoked shooting of two Palestinian policemen by a soldier stationed on the West Bank. On screen, the young man is there with his girlfriend, telling her what happened. Part of the time when he speaks he wears a mask which makes him look like a roto-scoped animated figure out of Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly, but we soon see just who he is. After telling her of the killings that seem to have been thought up out of boredom and sadism, he asks her if she thinks he is a murderer. She reserves judgment on that answer, yet you can tell that this relationship will never be the same. In between conversations, Mograbi is there as dramaturg and narrator, with a recitatif that makes you think of Brecht/Weill plays. The Brechtian alienation effect here is your own apprehension about whether the constantly self-mocking Mograbi has chosen the right medium for his subject. As he looks into the camera and sings, he seems to be throwing you into camp. An odd approach, but it's an approach that implies the difficulty of coming to terms with the kind of violence that we learn of in the ex-soldier's testimony, and which is on the rise.

Shot in Mograbi's apartment and in an ordinary room where the couple speak to each other, the film has Mograbi's trademark no-budget look and the relentless filmmaker's face challenging you on camera, and finding a way to remind you just who this movie's star is.

There is no confusion about who the star is in Pizza in Auschwitz, which makes Mogabi's musical about the murder of two Palestinians seem tame and reasonable. Pizza in Auschwitz is Moshe Zimmerman's film about the journey back to his hometown and to the camps where he spent the war years with the irascible Danny Hanoch, accompanied by his secular daughter Miriam and orthodox son Shagi.

Hanoch begins by describing himself as a BA, a bachelor of Auschwitz, and the jokes pile on from there. Before visiting a series of camps, all of which he survived, he takes his grown children and the film crew to Lithuania, where he says he spent a perfect childhood. No Jews remain on the silent streets. The closer Hanoch moves to the camps, the funnier he gets. His melancholic daughter is a chip off the old block, only gloomier. When her father is concerned that he might be late in arriving at the death camp, she comforts him: "Dad, a Jew is always welcome in Auschwitz." Hanoch demands as a right to film there, and to sleep in the bunk that he once shared with a dozen men, all of whom perished. The very request, and the manner in which Hanoch makes it, reduce the Polish administrators to tears. His daughter brings him pizza - "I've never had pizza here before," the old man says matter-of-factly. When his family's patience is strained, Hanoch finds young Germans to lecture. "I don't want to ruin your vacation," he says, half-apologetically, as he heads off to another camp.

Survivors' humor is a delicate thing, to put it mildly. It's best dispensed by someone who has earned the right to do it (although passages from Melvin Jules Bukiet's novel, After, give this doc a run for its money.) See Pizza in Auschwitz if you can on what should be a long run at Jewish film festivals.

Posted by dwhudson at December 2, 2008 6:37 AM