Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
another powerful scene of full frontal nudity toward the end of the fi lm, Mr. Baum takes his
clothes off in order to have one last shower. Dayan's personal physical degeneration from the
handsome young man he was when he appeared in
He Walked Through the Fields
to his run-
down image due to drug and alcohol abuse could be taken as symbolizing the decay of the
Sabra image.
Death, self-annihilation, aimless existence, and the search for a national identity in a time of
historical crisis are prominent features of Dayan's nihilistic cinema. Dayan's trilogy and other
fi lms of this era are a result of what the fi lmmakers see as confusing shifts. They broke away
from the politically critical cinema of the 1980s, where the protagonist and apparent victim of
the political complexity was the conscientious and usually leftist Sabra. This brought about the
rise of escapist fi lms that avoided taking a direct political stance by blurring the Israeli-Zionist
identity (of locales, characters, and story), as well as allegorical fi lms that depicted an apoca-
lypse awaiting Israeli society and the Zionist vision.
Pluralism and Beyond
Israeli fi lms after 2000 often tend to depict the lives and culture of sectors of Israeli society
that rarely — if ever — appeared in local fi lms before.
Late Marriage
, for example, directed in
2001 by newcomer Dover Kosashvili, portrays life within a family of Georgian immigrants who
mostly speak Georgian (it was screened with Hebrew subtitles). Surprisingly, this little fi lm
brought over 300,000 viewers to the cinemas, received rave reviews, and was considered the
beginning of a new phase in Israeli fi lmmaking.
Though not the fi rst,
Late Marriage
was a key fi lm in the current wave of ethnic or multi-
cultural Israeli cinema. Films in this genre are made mainly by young and promising directors
from diverse backgrounds and depict life in different sectors: the Orthodox right wing (
Time
of Favor
, Josef Cedar, 2000); new immigrants from Russia (
Yana's Friends
, Arik Kaplun, 1999);
veteran Iraqi Jews (
The Barbecue People
, David Ofek, 2003); Moroccan women oppressed by
their patriarchal and religious families (
To Take a Wife
, Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz, 2004); gays
(
The Bubble
, Eytan Fox, 2006); foreign illegal workers mostly from Third World countries; and
even Haredim, in
The Holy Guests
(Gidi Dar, 2004), a tale about a poor childless Jewish couple
in a Haredi Jerusalem neighborhood during the Sukkot (Feast of Tabernacles) holiday. This
unique fi lm was produced under the supervision of the Rabbinate and starts with a title card
reading “With divine providence,” a traditional phrase that religious Jews place on anything
they write.
The fi lm
Sh'hur
(Shmuel Hasfari, 1994), an autobiographical fi lm based on the memoirs of
its screenwriter-actor, Hana Azoulay-Hasfari, tells the story of a Jewish family, originally from
Morocco, living in a southern Israeli town in the 1970s. The story is told through the eyes of
the youngest and only Sabra (that is, Israeli-born) member of the family, the adolescent girl,
Heli. It raises doubts about the identity of second-generation immigrants.
Thus, the “westernized” Heli is not exactly a model for success: the settings — a television
studio, her home — are shown in cold and alienating bluish colors, while the past is shown in
warm reddish colors reminiscent of the warm, hearty Mizrahi environments depicted in the
