Essential World Cinema: 5 Best Israeli Films

It’s always interesting to find just how much you can learn about a nation’s cultural identity through its cinema. Israel, much like the rest of the Middle East has had a complex, tumultuous history rife with conflict and division. It’s rare that nations under such constant political pressure and scrutiny are able to birth cinema that gains international acclaim but thanks to an embryonic movement in the 60s that took a great deal of influence from the French New Wave cinema of the time, Israel has cultivated a rich, fascinating film industry that has broken out in a big way in the past decade or so.

Israeli cinema has enjoyed more critical praise, awards and festival recognition than any other nation in that part of the world and their films have a unique allure. The political, religious and military turmoil the country has undergone has given rise to a kind of filmmaking that is predicated on strong moral messages, examination of culture and character drama. The following 5 films are my personal highlights of that movement.

 

Jellyfish

Jellyfish is the kind of quirky comedic drama that looks poised to march into Cannes or Venice Film Festival and just win everything. Just as certain films are easily characterized as ‘Oscar-bait’, there’s certainly a checklist of tropes you could affix to the breed of films that almost always clean up on the festival circuit. Unusual people finding a life-affirming message at the heart of a series of bizarre events with a soundtrack that has a lot of xylophone in it. Multiple plotlines that only vaguely relate you say? Even better. Thankfully that’s as far as my cynicism reaches in this particular case because Jellyfish is as masterful as it is uplifting.

Written and directed by authors/husband and wife team Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen, the film is built around the stories of 3 women: a jaded catering worker who inadvertently adopts a muted, nymph-like child who appears on the beach and refuses to take her inner tube off, a Filipino care worker who speaks virtually no Hebrew tasked with caring for a grouchy old woman and a newlywed honeymooning in a ghastly hotel after breaking her leg during the reception. Despite the numerous language and lifestyle barriers presented between the film’s characters, it never rises beyond the humanity of the story, evoking comedy, tragedy, existentialism and the weirdest take on ‘Hamlet’ I think I’ve ever seen. It’s difficult to determine exactly what Jellyfish is trying to say, but it’s impossible not to be compelled by the depth and melancholia of it.

 

Lebanon

In 1982 Lebanon played host to one of the fiercest conflicts in the closing years of the Cold War, ultimately culminating in the infamous Siege of Beirut. The prominent military presence in this conflict was Israeli, a heavily mechanized force that steamrolled through numerous Lebanese settlements beating back Palestinian insurgents and causing untold amounts of collateral damage. It’s a controversial topic in Israel (and Syria) even now, so any film about it was always going to be challenging.

Lebanon goes further than that, some films grab you by the balls, but this you grabs you by them, hangs you upside-down, drops you into an Israeli tank and says “Stay here for 90 minutes and make sure you pay attention.” That’s right, from beginning to end the action of this film never leaves the claustrophobic confines of a tank with a 4-man crew, the view of the outside world is limited to a gunsight. It’s a tense, disturbing journey through the epicenter of an unspeakable conflict through the eyes of 4 frightened, unprepared young men trapped in a mobile metal casket, Das Boot style.

We see firefights, brutalized civilians, POWs and a generous helping of death from this uncomfortable vantage but ultimately it could be Lebanon or anywhere, the political and ideological implications are present but the ultimate message of the film is that war is claiming our young men, claiming their lives and claiming their souls. All the orders are barked from cold, callous, unseen superiors and all the emotional weight is left to the men behind the trigger, who slowly but surely crumble beneath it as the film goes on. It’s one of the most potent war films ever made.

 

Ajami

Racial and religious tension is a common theme in Middle Eastern fiction, since descendants of Judaism, Islam and Christianity live in such close proximity, it’s a strong and resonant topic. Ajami is a thick, heavy character drama that takes the issue very seriously. Set in Jaffa, the southernmost district of Tel Aviv, the film is presented in 5 chapters, each of which follows a different individual mired in a series of tumultuous events that follow a drive-by shooting. These characters include an illegal restaurant worker, a police officer and a young man labored with the responsibility of keeping his family safe.

Directed by Scandar Copti, an actual resident of that area, all the featured cast are non-professional actors and the film has a distinct documentary style to it, it feels tactile and true-to-life. It still however manages to be a visually stunning piece of film-making, masterfully shot and edited with a kind of breathless immediacy that never allows the undercurrents of tension to subside. Ajami is a film that takes no sides, instead opting to remind us how much damage can be done when people fail or simply refuse to understand each other and the non-linearity and depth of the story places it in the same purview as Pulp Fiction or City of God. Despite a slow start, the film will eventually have you in its clutches and once that happens you won’t be able to turn away.

 

The Band’s Visit

This is another film that centers on a cultural divide, but it couldn’t be more different. The Band’s Visit is quiet, thoughtful comedy about an Egyptian Police Orchestra bound for a gig at an Arabic Cultural Center in a city in central Israel. Unfortunately due to an issue stemming from the language barrier between Arabic and Hebrew, they end up in the wrong place, some depressing concrete afterthought in the middle of the desert, which only sees one bus per day. The amusingly austere band (who never change out of their robin’s egg blue uniforms) find themselves trapped there for the night, forced to depend on the hospitality of a local restaurateur and two of her patrons.

The film extends far beyond simple situational comedy though, the lead member of the band finds a friend in the restaurant owner (played beautifully by Ronit Elkabetz) and despite having to fumble through conversation in English, their only mutual tongue, they slowly bond through the course of the evening. Elsewhere the youngest member, a would-be Lothario, desperately tries to find something interesting to do and ends up at a roller rink as the fifth wheel on a disastrous double date, one or two other members are caught in the middle of a family dispute and another attempts to reach the Egyptian embassy via payphone, ever-shadowed by an odd, irritable man waiting for his girlfriend to call. Throughout the course of all this strangeness the characters all allow us a glimpse of their true selves and the dry humor gives way to real narrative weight, an exploration of loneliness, longing and affection. At the most basic level the film could be characterized as ‘a bunch of stuff that happened’ but there’s such charm running beneath it all that you find yourself hanging onto every frame. It walked away with the Un Certain Regard at Cannes but was left exempt from the Oscars because it had too much English in it to be considered a foreign language film, facepalm? Facepalm.

 

Waltz with Bashir

Like Lebanon, this film focuses on the events of the 1982 Lebanese conflict, but rather than paring it down to an esoteric human drama, this animated documentary tackles the wider issues of the conflict absolutely head-on. During the short war, Israeli forces let Christian Phalangists into Palestinian camps and they slaughtered masses of refugees in a massacre that has scarred Lebanese history ever since. The film is a semiautobiographical account from Ari Folman, a veteran of the conflict who had a front-row seat to this disaster. The animated style makes the whole thing seem like a hallucinatory, repressed fever dream and as much as the film is a brave confrontation of an unforgivable atrocity, it’s also a kind of meditative therapy for Folman himself, a man clearly still very disturbed by what he went through.

The animation style is based on rotoscoping, similar to A Scanner Darkly and it serves the tone masterfully, almost looking through a scope that leads directly into Folman’s mind, recounting both his recent experiences speaking to people he knew at the time and his disturbed recollections of surrounding the refugee camp, firing flares into the sky as Phalangists marched further in, killing as they went. Naturally a lot of controversy was sparked when the film was released in 2008, particularly in Lebanon, whose government would rather that such events stayed buried, but numerous Lebanese civilians demanded that the film saw national screenings, a fact that made Folman very proud.

Waltz with Bashir is one of those films that really speaks for the prevailing power of cinema. Much like The Act of Killing, Utopia and numerous others, it bravely confronts a thorny issue that perhaps isn’t as widely known about as it should be and doesn’t make any mystery of the horror and brutality of it. Documentation of history is one thing, direct confrontation is quite another and Waltz with Bashir is an essential reminder of something that never should have happened, straight from the mind of someone who was there to see it and recognizes that fact, despite having been on the wrong side. Everyone needs to see this film.