The Jewish International Film Festival (JIFF) is already midway at the Ritz Cinema in Randwick, Sydney, which started from 18 February up to 24 March 2021. There have been plenty of films screened, including a diverse selection of documentaries on various themes and topics.
Among the doco selections are the following three must-see essential pieces that are just both masterfully done and compelling to watch. Find time to see their last few screenings.
THE HUMAN FACTOR
From Israeli director Dror Moreh, who gave us the 2012 Oscar-nominated THE GATEKEEPERS, comes this moving and more often heartbreaking documentary on the art and challenges of peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority as well as neighbouring Arab countries like Syria and Lebanon. This very involving doco features Israeli Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin, Benjamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak and Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat, with negotiations brokered by US President Bill Clinton. The coverage starts with the Secretary of State James Baker under US President George H.W. Bush up to Clinton’s Oslo accords of 1993 and 1995 until the 2000 summit at Camp David at the end of Clinton’s term.
The principal spokespersons for this riveting doco are the peace negotiators Dennis Ross, Daniel Kurtzer, Martin Indyk, Aaron David Miller, Gamal Helal and Robert Malley. The highlights are the backstage private dealings explored, especially with the major players. What looked like an impossible endeavour became possible, especially between Rabin and Arafat, but Rabin got assassinated, and a series of attempts between Arafat with Netanyahu and Barak just brought it back to the realm of impossibility.
Using beautiful visuals, including subtle archival photo animations and relevant news footage, together with the revealing interviews, Moreh was able to piece together an exploration of shaky compromises and stubborn disputes that daunted the peace settlement process. This doco is both touching and rousing with its exceptional soundtrack, as it is quite frustrating in its content. The human factor in this film can be just that – despite the major powers that be, everyone’s only human.
TILL KINGDOM COME
This is a documentary that unmasks another side of America that pushes the ultimate irony of ironies. Israeli filmmaker Maya Zinshtein uncovers the unlikely strange political union between Israel’s right-wing groups and the blindly-devout American Christian evangelist organisations. It is a coalition sustained from a blend of Israel’s necessary pragmatism and American religious fanaticism where the latter believes that Israel’s preservation will play a vital role in the salvation of Christians when Armageddon arrives.
This recent phenomenon has even been made more pronounced during the Trump administration, which supported these pro-gun and pro-life evangelist followers. American Jews are traditionally more liberal than conservative, especially with the rise of anti-semitic neo-Nazi right-wing white nationalists mixed with the ultra-right Christian conservatives. However, this documentary investigates that there are no strange bedfellows when it comes to religion and politics.
The storytelling is eerily eye-opening and contentious in the actualities presented. It readily switches locale from the poverty-stricken Bible-belt towns of middle America to the grateful recipients of Christian generosity in Israel’s modern cities. It overturns the history of antisemitism of Christians into the more acceptable notion that Jews and Christians have more things in common than Islam. They do share the Bible’s Old Testament, a fact that actually binds the two religions together. If you want modern, provocative world realities, then this documentary is totally for you.
LOVE, IT WAS NOT
Through painstaking eyewitness testimonies collected from the archives of Israel’s Yad Vashem and Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation, including interviews from Holocaust women survivors in their nineties, Israeli director Maya Safarty crafts this unbelievable love story between a Jewish prisoner and an Austrian SS officer. Young Slovak inmate Helena Citron was asked to sing the German song “Love It Was Not” for the 20th birthday of SS captor Franz Wunsch. That was the beginning of a love affair that involved Wunsch saving Helena and many others from imminent death.
A highlight of this creatively constructed emotional drama was Helena’s surprise discovery of her sister Roza who arrived at Auschwitz with her two young children. Through Helena’s fearless request, Wunsch was able to save Roza but not her two children. Furthermore, even through their separation in 1945, Wunsch made sure Helena and Roza are supplied with warm clothing for their survival. After the war, Wunsch wrote tirelessly to Helena, hoping to fulfil his dream of reuniting with her through marriage. That, however, was the last time they would see each other. Flash forward thirty years later, Israeli-based Helena meets Wunsch in his war crimes trial in Vienna. Interestingly, more than appreciating Helena’s speaking of the truth in his defence, Wunsch was more devastated by the fact that not once did Helena look at him in the eye.
More than just a love story, helmer Safarty has pieced together a humanistic narrative that transcends race, conflict and ideology. There are references to kindness, albeit in a system of cruelty, torture and inhumanity. The style is classic documentary storytelling using carefully arranged interviews that incorporate modern-day graphics within the photomontage. More than just its style is its strong content, a story seldom heard and told, but a story that does happen and has happened.
