If you’d asked me a year ago did I believe cinema could change the world, I would have answered you with an enthusiastic “yes!” Now? Read on to find out…
In a week-old interview with Variety’s Elsa Keslassy, Cannes director Thierry Fremaux admitted “Israeli and Palestinian filmmakers, like intellectuals from these two countries in general, are traditionally favorable to a dialogue and those whom I know are calling for an end of the conflict and the opening of negotiations.” This was Fremaux’s reply when asked, by the Paris-based journalist and fellow Golden Globes voter, if we could expect any Palestinian or Israeli cinema in the Official Selection during these challenging times.
Yet, and I’ve heard this from both sides, there appears to be a stalemate when it comes to cinema from the region, at least as far as financing is concerned. I’ve been told by both Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers they were advised “come back when this is over” when applying for funding. It could be just a rumor, but it makes sense. At the start of the Russia/Ukraine war, Russians filmmakers suddenly found themselves 'personae non gratae’ at film festivals and the Russian “Roskino” pavilion disappeared from the Cannes Film Festival Marche back in 2022, as Screen outlined.
This information notwithstanding, in Berlin there were two standout films, which defied borders and surpassed expectations. One was a journey to the heart of the possibility of peace, through the lenses of four Israeli and Palestinian filmmakers — Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Rachel Szor and Hamdan Ballal — coming together in No Other Land. The film won the Panorama Audience Award for Best Documentary Film and has a 91/100 rating on Metacritic, a hint that gives my soul a bit of hope for the future.
The other was Amos Gitai’s Shikun, screening as a Berlinale Special, a modern retelling of the Eugene Ionesco play Rhinoceros, which was made into a comedy back in 1974 starring Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel, produced by Ely Landau. Even then, the idea of a town seeing its residents turning into unthinking, unstoppable giant beasts, while one of their own watched the transformation uncertain of what to do, appealed to the Jewish intelligentsia — albeit the Hollywood one. No one has witnessed the evil power of mass frenzy, coupled with general apathy, as the Jews have.
Shikun, which was conceived and shot by Gitai before the events of October 7th, 2023 and the subsequent response by Israel, unlike the Hollywood film is not a comedy, but rather an abstract, thoughtful examination of a society which is constantly living on the edge. With the magnificent Irène Jacob taking on the role of the film’s “narrator” of sorts, in the play the masculine character Bérenger, Shikun takes the audience on a rollercoaster ride and begs us to ask ourselves “will we ever see the end of this?”
It’s a question I’m still pondering the answer to myself, more than a month after watching the film. And the reason why it has taken me this long to write about it.
During our interview in Berlin, in a secret back room of the Adlon Kempinski which (appropriately perhaps?) proved a challenge to reach, Gitai admits that the inspiration for the film, as with a few of the Israeli auteur’s recent project has been “the prime minister, who is a cynical, dangerous, knowledgeable and cultivated guy — he probably swallowed Machiavelli by heart. [He’s a] manipulator on a high level, dangerous, no ethics no constraint, who decided to do what you call a juridical reform.” Gitai continues, to explain “so normally, as you know from political science, a democracy has to have three institutions — the executive, the constitutional or legislative, and the juridical. Israel has de-facto two, because in order to be a prime minister you need the parliamentary majority and Netanyahu, through scare tactics and corruption is holding very tightly to his 64 [seat] majority, in a chamber of 120.”
Gitai goes on to illuminate me on this point even further, by saying that Netanyahu “got this majority partly because of mistakes of the Left, with the over exaggerated egos of its leaders who didn’t know to unify. And now he wanted to attack the juridical — which has something very particular [to Israel] in that any citizen can appeal directly to the Supreme Court to sanction government action, something used by the Palestinians, Human Rights lawyers, etc.” The PM wanted to cancel this consideration, to basically become the leader of an autocratic, authoritarian regime. The dictator of the Middle East’s largest democracy.
Here is the trailer for the film’s French release, earlier in March. Subtitles are in French, évidemment.
We all remember that old credo at center of the 1997 film Wag the Dog, starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro. When something is going to turn into a PR nightmare, start a war to distract the people, and maybe this will also succeed in bringing them all together, to your side. Which is exactly what Netanyahu has done. Albeit, aided by the short-term vision of Hamas, which sent its minions to invade Israeli-held territories and killed, injured and kidnapped innocent civilians.
You see, part of my ambivalence about the power of cinema is that we lost on that day, the 7th of October, from the get go and for all humanity, be it Israeli, Palestinian or whichever. And a lot of us are still trying to prove who is right and who is wrong.
When you kill or injure one person, you have injured and killed us all as a human race. Yet that quote often attributed to Mahatma Gandhi, probably instead by American journalist and politician George Perry Graham, which goes “an eye for an eye will leave everyone blind,” tells us that revenge isn’t the solution. Or is it? I don’t know, no one I know was killed or injured that day and I can’t speak. Neither should anyone else who hasn’t experienced that pain. But the relatives of victims of October 7th have called for the madness and Netanyahu to stop — and they know.
Shikun brings together a cast of Palestinian, Israeli, Eastern European and Asian actors, along with the stunning Jacob, who descends into her own doubts and ponders if being the voice of reason all the time is worth the effort. It’s what I’m wondering myself.
Within the eerie, utopian setting of a long public housing building in the Southern desert of Israel and through the dark alleys of an old bus station in Tel Aviv, we see people strangely conversing with each other in different tongues. With each other! We witness, through Jacob’s storytelling and some paper mache horns, the crowds turning into rhinoceros, beings unable to think for themselves, moved only by the incitement of others, and the excitement of finally having found a common thread to their lives. It’s all so perfectly possible that I found myself sobbing in my seat when the ending of Shikun came around and Jacob delivers her final, doubt-filled monologue, nearly straight from Ionesco’s play. It goes something like: “I should have gone with them while there was still time. Now it's too late! Now I'm a monster, just a monster. Now I'll never become a rhinoceros, never, never! I've gone past changing. I want to, I really do, but I can't, I just can't. I can't stand the sight of me. I'm too ashamed!” I’m paraphrasing, using Ionesco’s words of course, but that’s the core of it. Because above all else, we as humans wish to belong, even if it’s in a world of monsters — we want to be monsters too.
Or do we have the courage to stand up and be the one oddity in a sea of sameness?
Towards the film’s ending there is a stunning poem by Palestinian author Mahmood Darwish, ‘Think of others’, while Shikun also includes a passage from Umberto Eco on cowardice, and, as Gitai explains, features “a text by Israeli journalist and writer Amira Hass, who was the Haaretz newspaper's correspondent in the occupied territories, Gaza and the West Bank, for decades, I believe she's still in Ramallah. The text on "Our children will ask: how could you (inflict the injustices and atrocities inflicted on the Palestinians for so many years)?" is based on one of her writings.”
The haunting music which plays throughout Shikun, a word that in Hebrew means "social housing," is also the product of collaboration — our only hope in this moment is for someone to stop the madness and require all parties involved to sit down and reason this out. As Gitai explains in the press kit for the film, “Louis Sclavis came from France to be present on the set, and played while we filmed — you can see him in the picture, with his saxophone. And Alexei Kochetkov, who lives in Berlin, happened to be in Tel Aviv when the film project took shape. I sang him a tune my father used to play on his violin, and on this basis he composed what became the film's main musical phrase.”
Personally, I’m exhausted, of calling for a bridge between cultures, and pitching my ideas on how cinema with a conscience could help us change the world for the better to publications that don’t care, or have their own agendas when it comes to Israel and Palestine. I do believe that guns and bombs don’t kill, people kill people and a ceasefire needs to be called ASAP. I also believe that watching violent films and TV has changed us, as a whole, and perhaps we need to reconsider our digital diet, not just our food one. What we put into our body is as important as what we devour with our senses, and vice versa.
Finally, in Berlin I ask Gitai if the dream of peace in Israel is dead. His reply I leave you with, as famous last words. “I definitely don’t think so because what is the alternative? If I say yes, we are into nihilism — we celebrate death and destruction now? I’m not a pessimist by nature, because maybe from this terrible tragedy we’ll emerge with the understanding that we’ll have to find another modus vivendi, between Israeli and Palestinians — and that’s my hope.”
Top image courtesy of the Berlinale, used with permission.