Category: UK JFF

Absolutely fascinating documentary. Saying it now, this is gonna be a long review, because this film is packed and to even give an outline of the setup is to dive into a thoroughly messy time in history.

Reckonings outlines the story of how Germany came to agree to pay reparations for the Jews killed in the Holocaust. If you are thinking, “Aye, well obviously you would”, you don’t know how complicated this story is. If anything I wish this film had been longer, more detailed. I wanna go away and read more about the subject.

I knew absolutely nothing about the Luxembourg Agreement coming into this. I had never given much thought for how compensation came to be, as it seemed the most normal, natural, and only moral response. But it was a very different world in 1952. The Nazis didn’t evaporate at the end of the war, and they were still part of the social fabric of Germany. Even if someone wasn’t a card-carrying member, the entire population had been subject to years of indoctrination that they, their loved ones and their way of life were under attack from Jews, that Jews had been a legitimate and real threat, whose defeat was simple self-defence. To put it in disgustingly reductive terms, Germany had been defeated by the Allies, the Jews had been defeated by Germany, and that was just the way things were, like it or not; the idea that Germany would pay not only those who had triumphed over them, but also those who they had subdued seemed to fly in the face of logic. It was unprecedented.

And not popular. The German Chancellor Adenauer spearheaded the push for compensation to be given, and received a bomb in the post for his views. Even those who didn’t object on the basis of antisemitism, objected on the basis of self-interest. Germany had been bombed flat by the Allied forces. It had been economically destroyed by the cost the war. It had been split into two, and East Germany under the Soviets took absolutely no responsibility for actions of the Nazis. So West Germany, who I’m just gonna be referring to as Germany here, felt they had enough on their plate, and enough understandable excuses to get out of paying.

Luckily Adenauer wasn’t swayed. A devout Catholic, he was convinced something must be done for the victims of the Holocaust, and that Germany must show its rejection of the their legacy. When Jewish representatives came to the negotiating table, they expected to see the same old faces, the people who had thrived under Nazi rule and continued to enjoy power and status in the new Germany. What they got was Adenauer, a man who so vehemently spoke out against the Nazis that he was suspected, although incorrectly, of being behind the assassination plot that almost killed Hitler. He was lifted by the Gestapo for questioning, but managed to escape the interrogation centre. However they then lifted his wife and did god knows what to her to get her to tell them where he was hiding. She withstood everything until they threatened to bring in her children, at which point she caved and told them what they wanted to hear. Adenauer understood her decision completely and forgave it utterly, but she could not live with it and took her own life. He was a man well acquainted with the Nazi capacity for barbarity.

However, not everyone shared his commitment to ensuring the horrors of the Nazi regime were acknowledged and its victims made amends. His Finance Secretary Fritz Schaffer felt like the one billion dollars promised was just an utterly unworkable sum of money, and undermined the entire negotiation process by trying to barter down the price. He was trying to balance Adenauer’s push for compensation with the influence of Hermann Josef Abs, a banker who had been a Nazi collaborator and was now in charge of trying to argue down the Allied powers on terms of war reparations. Pincered between the two, and responsible for keeping Germany solvent in these tentative years after the war, he looked for any way to get that number down.

You can imagine how the Jews felt about that. It cannot be emphasised how deep the feelings were about these negotiations on the part of Jewish people. Every negotiator was there representing millions dead and hundreds of thousands still living and suffering from what was done. To look Germans in the eye and hear them quibble over pennies in the face of their loss was something the word ‘insult’ does not begin to cover.

From the get-go the idea of sitting down the Germans was utterly repugnant to many Jews. In Israel, when Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion suggested they hear the Germans out, Menachem Begin held a rally outside denouncing him as a traitor, and the crowd was so enflamed they attempted to storm the Knesset. Ben-Gurion argued, quite rightly, that the Nazis had stripped their victims of every financial asset they had, and to allow the Germans to continue to enjoy possession of it was a terrible injustice. He argued that it was Israel’s place to fight for the rights of the 700,000 Holocaust survivors within its borders. Even still, the motion passed by only one vote.

And while I have so far presented this process as a Germany vs the Jewish community negotiation, it was actually more complicated than that. Germany was jointly negotiating with the state of Israel and an international organisation set up to represent Holocaust survivors elsewhere globally. And all of Israeli politics also comes into play.

They were bankrupt after the Arab-Israeli War that led to the establishment of Israel and the Palestinian Catastrophe. After an all-consuming war on all sides against every neighbouring country, the survival and protection Holocaust victims was conflated with the survival and protection of the Israeli state, an attitude that went unchallenged at the negotiations and within this documentary. The means for the Israeli government to buy arms is put forward in the same breath as the means to feed and clothe refugees. And while this is a film that is packed with plenty already, and it is understandable that it wants to keep focus solely on the victims of the Holocaust, there is a big yikes! in the lacuna in this part of the story.

My favourite part of this film was Ben Ferencz, a wonderful man, who I was delighted to see again after his appearance in Getting Away With Murder(s). A life replete with good work, he pops up here as a negotiator on behalf of the international Jewish community, outlining the legal argument on which the basis of reparations should be made. A small man, with sharp, clever eyes, he is frank and fair in his assessment of the situation, direct and open in his interview. He has a calm and a kindness to the way he speaks that I find admirable. At 102 at the time of this interview, he is still incisive as ever. So glad he is still with us, the man’s a treasure.

As I said at the beginning, this is a long review, but even outlining the moving parts gives you some idea of just how packed this 75-minute documentary is. Deeply intriguing, great film.

We Left The Camp Singing is a look at the musical culture in Theresienstadt, the ‘model’ ghetto the Nazis used for propaganda purposes. It was considered by the Nazis to be one of the less harsh places Jews were sent, that there were enough vestiges of a normal life to give the appearance to others, such as humanitarian inspectors, that the prisoners’ conditions were hard but not inhumane. In reality over 30,000 people died there and approximately 88,000 were deported from there to die at Auschwitz.

But Theresienstadt was a unique place. Many of those sent were Jews whose immediate murder might provoke an unwanted social response, namely elderly people, children, veterans for the First World War, and people who were famous or well-respected in their field. So Theresienstadt ended up with a lot of top class musicians, people who were extremely gifted. And despite initial Nazi repression, their performances were then capitalised on for public performances for propaganda purposes. However, it was for the people of Theresienstadt that the musicians played, to give them brief respite from the reality around them.

Beautiful work was composed and written there. Some of which were hidden inside mattresses, some inside the roofs and walls. Even now we are still recovering music that was made there. Great composers such as Pavel Haas, Gideon Klein, Rafael Schachter and Alice Herz-Sommer all did work while at Theresienstadt.

It was the work of Pavel Haas that first caught the attention of the filmmaker. She is an Italian pianist, and she was gripped when hearing a piece of Haas’s work for the first time. When she subsequently discovered that he had composed the work while in Theresienstadt, she had to know more. Her research led her to create this documentary, interviewing survivors about life in the camps, and about the role music played.

The survivors speak of the transformative power of music, its ability to release them from the place and time they found themselves in and transport them elsewhere. They talked of how it would nourish them, even when they were hungry. They talked of people working all day, exhausted from hunger and labour, still taking time at the end of their day to sing together in a choir. The filmmaker herself goes to the site where the ghetto stood, and in its old buildings, plays the music that was made here, letting the notes echo through its empty walls.

The subject is fascinating but I didn’t like how the documentary itself was put together. It was done in that style I dislike where the filmmaker centres themselves in the story, speaking about it as though it is their journey of discovery, showing their reactions while listening to interviews. I understand it’s meant to make the story personal and relatable, but it just gets my back up, it comes off as egotistical, like you are trying to eclipse your subject, believe your curiosity deserves to take screen-time away from those whose stories you are meant to be telling, that their stories somehow need your on-camera endorsement for an audience to listen, that you are taking the stories of others and slapping your branding over it to sell yourself. I know that’s not what’s intended in most cases, I know that this is a new filmmaker’s first film and that they trained as a pianist and not a documentary director, but still, I found it irksome. And because it was her first film, I can forgive a lot of it. It just bothered me.

Despite any flaws in its construction, this film shines a light on a fascinating subject.

I was in two minds about watching this documentary because I’m in such a happy queer space right now and I knew this was just going to be wall-to-wall religious trauma. But it’s such an important subject and it’s such a rare opportunity to have see inside what takes place in conversion therapy.

“The religious community offers very clear options,” says one survivor. “One is to marry a woman, even though you’re attracted to men. Two is to live alone. Three is to leave the Orthodox life. And four is suicide.”

The documentary follows two men, Ben and Lev, as they continue in the conversion therapy they’ve been undergoing for years in the hopes it might rid them of their attraction to other men. Ben is in his early 20s and has been in conversion therapy since he was 16, when he fell in love with another boy at yeshiva school, and their constant companionship and longing glances were noticed by the principal, who immediately outed him to his family and expelled him from the school. Lev is in his 50s and has been in conversion therapy for almost 30 years, since emigrating from the States to Israel. He fled New York in the early 90s, what would have been during the AIDS crisis, and became deeply religious, settled in the Holy Land and married a woman. Three decades on he is divorced, single, and still attending private and group therapy sessions to end his attractions.

The thing that sticks out from the get-go is how deeply lonely a life it makes. And you see how it works, this cult-like therapy, because you have literally no other support network. The only place where you are shown any kind of empathy and support is in the therapy. Because you can’t have authentic loving relationships, because you can’t establish honest and real friendships, because everything with your family is so conditional and always balanced on a precipice of world-shattering loss. You are utterly reliant on the therapy continuing because it’s the only connection that makes you feel hopeful and good about yourself.

And it’s so easy to see how you would not clock it as abusive. The conversion therapy in Israel originates and is evangelised from the religious right in the States. It was developed there in the 90s, again during the AIDS crisis, and seems to have grown like a weed based on collective queer trauma. And it is specifically dressed up not to look like the more traditional forms of conversion therapy, namely strapping your genitals to a car battery, inducing vomiting so you throw up when shown pornography, beatings, and nothing short of sexual assault. All of those things are hard to disguise as legitimate therapy, but talking? Pshh! Talking is free, and voluntary, and everything legitimate therapy is based on. So softly, softly, catchy monkey, you have these nice people, with kind voices, tell you that you can be everything you need to be, for your family, for your community, for your religion. You can have the happy and fulfilling cishet TM life. You are going to be able to be this person you feel like you should be, want to be, are desperate to be, and that they, and they alone, can help you get there.

They go into all this bollocks about how attraction to men is rooted in traumatic and difficult relationships your father, which is of course gonna resonate with everyone in the room, because if they had a loving father, he wouldn’t let them spend a single minute in conversion therapy. So of course in that room it hits as true 100% of the time. And that just reinforces that the therapy is insightful and based on tangible evidence.

Over the course of the film you are just begging for both these men to get out this situation. The traumatic scenes I had dreaded going into the film, something dramatic with vulnerable people having hateful scorn poured upon them, don’t materialise. Instead it manifests as this continual drip-drip, done with soft voices and gentle hands, of slowly mutilating people from the inside out.

Really excellent documentary, done with patience, understanding and empathy for its subjects, and eschewing anything gratuitous or retraumatising for the audience.

Really well put-together drama.

Simon lives in a nice middle-class block of flats, and to get some money to do up the kitchen, he sells the storage space he has in the building’s basement. It’s basically a swanky tenement with a sub-floor, that is divided into individual rooms for the tenants, each looking a lot like a coal hut. Simon finds a nice buyer, Mr Fonzic, who gives him a lovely sob story about his mother’s tragic passing and how he needs to clear out her place tout suite because he’s being victimised by her old landlord. Being a soft touch, Simon knocks a grand off the asking price and gives him his key early.

Until . . . he finds out who Fonzic really is. This bumbling, soft-spoken, sloped-shouldered, elderly History teacher is in fact a Holocaust denier who spreads his godawful hateful messages online. Fuck.

And here his problem begins. Because Fonzic moves into the basement room, using it as a base to tap out his cries of global conspiracy and fake news. The neighbours are disgusted and want to know what Simon plans to do about it. He starts down a litany of legal remedies but is stymied at every turn.

Meanwhile Fonzic is on his charm offensive, his “what, little old me?” bit. He sighs at how he has become a persona non grata simply for asking questions. How he is living in a poor bare basement, getting his drinking water from the courtyard hose tap, washing at the local swimming baths, is alone, is friendless, all for the harmless crime of being a free-thinker. Aw diddums.

The awful thing is this shit works. His assumption of victimhood is symbolically represented by the basement room itself. Simon’s great-uncle was killed in Auschwitz, and the last year he lived in the building was in hiding in that basement room. Fonzic’s physical occupation of it represents his appropriation of the story of Jewish persecution to manufacture a narrative of his own oppression. The room itself is at the very end of the lightless, windowless corridor beneath ground, its bare brick and wooden doors reminiscent of the entrance to the gas chamber.

And it also represents the underbelly of society, the things we want to forget about and be gone. The other neighbours in the building, they are initially appalled and find Fonzic’s presence distasteful, but they very much see him as Simon’s responsibility to deal with. They ask him over and over what Simon is doing about him, but never suggest ways to deal with Fonzic nor take him on as a problem themselves.

Indeed, as the film goes on, they grow warmer to him. Fonzic is, after all, just a bumbling, unshaven History teacher in an old coat. He’s so nice and polite. He waters the flowers. He’s already been through enough, living in the cold and dark down there, all alone, poor soul. All for holding an opinion! He’s not a monster, he’s not violent, he hasn’t done anything to Simon personally.

It’s Simon who looks like the crazy one, coming undone over the course of the film, as he goes from being so sure his reasonable objections to Fonzic’s occupation will be taken seriously, to finding himself running out of options, humiliated, isolated and having to stand by and watch the impact on his loved ones. His wife, who until that point, has always been ‘the Catholic in the family’ begins researching the family history and grows intensely frightened for the safety of her Jewish husband and half-Jewish daughter. She sees the clear threat Fonzic represents and is frustrated by Simon’s attempts to downplay it to keep her calm and docile. His daughter slowly falls under Fonzic’s sway, not understanding how everyone around her is losing their mind about this little old man, who is so kind and polite.

The film shows how tolerance for these thin-end-of-the-wedge types very quickly normalise a climate of fear and hatred, and have a devastating impact upon the people at whose expense they are tolerated. They don’t need to swing a punch or carry a gun to create a campaign of terror, and to swiftly change the perception of who belongs and who doesn’t belong.

Fuck Nazis.

Excellent film.

Based on the minutes of the actual meeting, The Conference shows the meeting where the Final Solution was proposed and planned. The film contrasts the high stakes and utter brutality of the subject matter discussed with the sedate and bureaucratic procedure of what takes place in the room.

That is the twin achievement of this film, to make an entire film in one location, without action, mostly of seated discussion, absolutely riveting, while simultaneously making you understand how sitting through this meeting, like most work meetings, would be mundane, technical, and boring, without the film itself ever being boring. There is the petty posturing, the departmental territorialism, the microaggressions, and the impatience to just get to the fucking end. Questions of the eradication of millions of people become secondary to when the tea break is, what there is to eat, stepping out for a fag break. Eichmann flirts with his secretary and Meyer doesn’t like his seat and Heydrich asks Stuckart how his wife is doing and when’s she due.

My worry at the start of the film was that it was gonna be difficult to follow who everyone was. There’s 16 characters around the table, they all arrive in quick succession and are introduced with their title and rank. The military are all in uniform and they all have the same haircut. I worried everyone would get lost in the shuffle. But with skillful performances and direction, each character emerges, their temperament, their priorities. The film draws out the small nuances of interactions to show relationship dynamics, these tiny powerplays for dominance. If you like something like the Mindhunter tv series, you’ll like this. All these horrendous actions discussed sedately while seated around a table, all this gripping tension driven from minute expressions and behaviour, how each person is seeking something they need and even in ordinary conversation are trying to establish the power to have that met.

And another impressive feat is to make a film this engrossing while having absolutely no one to root for. Every character is a bastard, a mass murderer. No one here speaks up for the Jews, or looks like they have any hesitation or compunction about what they are doing. Your heart rises for a moment when it looks like Kritzinger is going to raise a moral objection to what they are doing, only for it to sink immediately when he asks the question of the burden this will put on the mental health of their soldiers. After carrying out the annihilation of millions of people, will they be able to come back and be productive members of society? We don’t want them shell-shocked or alcoholics or blunted with sadism. They should be able to come back and be bakers and bankers and schoolteachers and carpenters. How can we make mass murder easier on them?

What I liked so much about this film is, by making it about the boring admin side of an atrocity, by making it so identifiably mundane as a work meeting, with its handouts and its cost projections, by making it about departmental targets to get their numbers down, it demythologises and de-exceptionalises it as an event. So much of media about the Nazis present them as evil incarnate, this time, this place, where Hell put a foot down on earth. The black-and-white film, the skull and crossbones insignia caps, a seeming caricature of malevolence in uniform, all marching lock-step like they are no longer human beings but mechanical, like many ants making up a great hive, no longer human at all. And instead of learning from them, they become iconic; instead of believing this is what people are capable of, we believe it is what we are incapable of, an evil beyond our comprehension. But it was mostly made up of things like this, just this. Boring meetings. Departmental targets. Discussion about transport and quotas and scheduling. When Kritzinger brings up how to make the eradication of other human beings easier on the troops I was reminded of the documentary Machine, where the Americans argue for using AI in military action so as to ensure soldiers are less likely to be traumatised from the effects of war. When the attendees bicker about how difficult it is to deport so many Jews from Germany only to have to find places for them in other occupied territories, whose officials are already trying to reduce their own Jewish populations, I am reminded of listening to the narrative of refugees in Europe, British politicians insisting they are France’s problem, France insisting they don’t want them, Greece insisting they can’t support new arrivals, and everyone complaining about the tightness of borders, and never the treatment of human beings. These were not exceptional arguments being made at Wannsee, they were the same arguments made many times before and after. The Conference rehumanises this story, and in doing so, shows it to be the work of ordinary people, accountable for the impact their decisions have on others.

An excellent film, skillfully executed and beautifully performed.

Closing out the UK Jewish Film Festival is Sin La Habana, which is a funny coincidence with all the Cuban movies I’ve been watching with Havana Glasgow. Sin La Habana is about a Cuban ballet dancer who makes a plan to get him and his girl out the country.

The opening scene is of Leo getting a Santeria blessing for good luck so that he might get the part of Romeo in the upcoming production of Havana’s ballet company. They are going on a worldwide tour, and Leo desperately wants to get out of the country, and start a new life with his girlfriend, Sara. All the good advice he gets from the Orisha, they tell him, “You must improve your character and be more equanimous”, he then soundly ignores, leading to his journey in the film to go astray.

When the company post the parts for the production, he is given the part of Prince of Verona, instead of the lead, Romeo. He is enraged, marches into the director’s office, demanding to know why he’s not the lead when he is the best dancer. Now, if he’d even stopped there, he might have still been ok, but when the director tells him that he might be the best dancer, but his attitude stinks, he’s entitled, he’s arrogant, and just like this right here, he doesn’t take instruction and work together with the ensemble, always charging in like he is a soloist, Leo doesn’t take the criticism well. He calls the director a racist, and is promptly fired.

So he and Sara come up with another plan. He starts teaching samba to tourists, where he meets Nasim, a Jewish Iranian-Canadian. They decide he will seduce Nasim, get her to bring him to Canada, where he will marry her, and arrange for Sara to come after. Sara is not precious about sexual fidelity, but tells him not to look Nasim in the eyes when he has sex with her, this one intimacy being the bulwark against genuine love.

Everything goes to plan at first, but once Leo is in Canada, he feels totally lost. He finds it difficult to practice Santeria, casting offerings into frozen rivers. His auditions for dance companies don’t meet with the immediate success he was expecting, and he frequently finds the encounters humiliating. The only other Cuban he meets in Montreal manages to get him a job in a fish factory, earning dogshit wages.

He is desperate to see Sara again, so goes in debt to pay his Cuban-Canadian mate to marry her and bring her back. Meanwhile, his relationship with Nasim is not as straightforward as he thought. Her father is a racist who doesn’t even want Leo in his house, and tells Nasim she should have stayed with her physically abusive ex-husband. Nasim doesn’t really understand anything about Santeria customs and he doesn’t really understand anything about Jewish customs. She half-knows he’s using her, but enjoys their relationship too much to really let herself think about it.

The whole story is one of self-sabotage, miscommunication, and disconnection. Leo’s dream is closest at the beginning of the film, and if he’d just played the Prince of Verona, he might have achieved his goals without much complication. But the path he follows is nothing but complication, and with every step it seems to pull the relationship he values most out of alignment.

I didn’t like some of the directorial choices. When the film tries to be stylistic, it comes off as affected and jarring, kinda takes you out of the flow of the story. Actually, when the focus is on just telling the beats of the story, it’s much better, giving the performances room. In fact, some of the most beautiful shots in the film are the ones where the director does the least, allowing them to speak for themselves.

The performances are all strong. I really like the guy who plays Leo, Yonah Acosta Gonzalez, because fundamentally the character is an asshole, and it’s hard to make that sympathetic. He doesn’t try to distract and overcompensate by making the character charismatic or bombastic. He also doesn’t let him off the hook by acting like he’s some poverty-stricken soul desperately trying to make it in any way to a better life. Leo’s life in Havana is pretty sweet, with the love of a beautiful woman, doing what he loves for a living by dancing, with his mother lovingly supporting him. He isn’t in some terrible situation that justifies hurting Nasim to get out. He’s selfish, he’s arrogant, he’s the cause of a lot of his own problems. So it’s amazing that Yonah manages to make him sympathetic. He looks lost, he looks vulnerable, he looks disappointed when he can’t understand what he’s doing wrong to thwart all his plans. He does come to care for Nasim, and is angry when he sees she doesn’t have the kind of support from her family that he has always received from his. The Havana dance director fires him, telling him he has no humility, and this whole journey is humbling for him. He just gets more and more lost and confused. Yonah really manages to capture the audience’s empathy, without altering the reality of the character’s flaws.

Sin La Habana is interesting because in a lot of the Cuban documentaries I just watched, they can barely convince people to move a town over, people in Cuba have a really strong connection to the place they’re from, and people in Havana love it fiercely. Leo is desperate to leave, but once he does, he’s adrift in Canada, unable to do the things he considers integral to his identity, like dance and practice Santeria. In Havana, he knows who he is. Without it, he feels lost.

A solid film, which despite some distracting stylistic flourishes, manages to take you on a really interesting character journey.

Wow. That was amazing.

In a fortnight of watching some really excellent documentaries, this one is something else. I highly recommend you watch it.

Kings of Capitol Hill is about the powerful Washington lobbying group AIPAC, which stands for American Israeli Public Affairs Committee. Its job is to ensure the US supports policies that favour Israel, and lobbies lawmakers to get them onside. They are formidable, and are seen as having the ability to make or break politicians.

For the whole of my lifetime, AIPAC has been synonymous with a juggernaut of lobbyist power, and why you’ll never get America to do anything about Israel, in a reigning in sense. So it was really interesting for me to see the founders of AIPAC were actually all a bunch of hippies. This documentary interviews prominent AIPAC office holders from its inception through to 2016. So you really get to see how a well-meaning project designed to protect Jewish lives in the Middle East became a runaway nightmare, monstrous to the people who created it.

AIPAC was originally founded by young activists who been involved in the civil rights movement, in the opposition to the Vietnam War, and other causes for peace and justice. They were concerned that Israel, a state in its infancy at the time, and the people who lived there, including many survivors of the Shoah, were going to be wiped out in a co-ordinated attack by its surrounding countries, like in the 6-Day War. They felt a responsibility as American Jews to do what they could to protect Jewish lives.

Something which started out with a handful of people grew and grew, and eventually reached a point where they were pretty successful in reaching politicians of either party in every state. An early test of their strength was when Senator Charles Percy, a Republican, began to question the amount of aid that was consistently being sent to Israel. Like many Republicans, Percy wasn’t a fan of foreign aid, seeing it as sending American tax dollars abroad, and while I doubt he and I probably couldn’t have less in common, I have to agree he makes a fair point about $3 billion dollars being spent annually on Israel without scrutiny, when you couldn’t spend $3 billion dollars domestically without scrutiny. Now, the guy wasn’t anti-Israel, he wasn’t saying Israel shouldn’t be recognised as a state or some shit. He wasn’t even saying let’s dial back the aid we send to Israel or stop sending it altogether. No, he was saying there isn’t sufficient scrutiny of what we’re sending and why we’re sending it, and for every dollar of foreign aid fought over, debate on this topic is silent, and that’s not a good thing when flinging around billions of dollars. And they canned his ass. I mean, there are lots of reasons not to vote Republican, but AIPAC actively supported his ousting in favour of his more vocally pro-Israel opponent, and it was seen both by politicians and within AIPAC as a show of their might.

And that blind loyalty, and smashing of even calls for discussion on the subject, is how we got here. Because when the 70s became the 80s, and Reagan rose to power, the makeup of AIPAC’s rank and file flipped from being hippie Democrats to being staunchly Republican. The more Reagan emphasised Israel as a key player in his militaristic outlook on the Middle East, the more the view shifted from Israel needs America for its safety and security to American needs Israel for its safety and security. Thus support for Israel became a nationalistic duty, and any failure to commit to it fully was a treachery.

All the old hippies got fired. Executive Director Dine went on record for his support for a Palestinian state, and was promptly given his pink slip. And I don’t think they’d really realised up until that point what a political weapon they’d created. But now it was in the hands of a bunch of hardened neocons.

And then you get the peace process in the 90s. And as one former AIPAC officer puts it, “AIPAC wants peace like Yasser Arafat wants a bar mitzvah.” Because there’s no money in peace. During the Oslo Accords, donations to AIPAC tanked. Because who needs a lobby to protect Israel from its enemies, if Israel makes peace with its enemies?

And even though AIPAC bills itself as bipartisan, that obviously doesn’t seem to extend to Israeli politics, because when the left gets in, when anyone committed to peace gets in, AIPAC’s objectives remain right-wing with an emphasis on military solutions. So even during the Oslo negotiations, AIPAC actively undermined them by lobbying for limitations on what money could be spent in Palestine or on Palestinians. They did their best to narrow the wiggle-room America had during talks, and ensure that all Palestinian engagement was viewed with skepticism and distrust.

Then Rabin gets shot dead by an Israeli right-winger, and the Israeli right-wing comes to power, the Oslo Accords go in the bin, and AIPAC is back in its comfort zone. So what you have in AIPAC is two right-wing blocs coming together, feeding on each other’s fear and paranoia, spurring each other further and further right.

Until eventually, you get Trump. And here we have the situation where a leader of the extreme far-right, who is supported by white nationalists, neo-Nazis, KKK, and antisemites of every stripe, is being supported by AIPAC. And for a lot of people still inside AIPAC at that time, that was a real wake-up call. How can we possibly have drifted into the situation where a Jewish lobbying group who was founded to protect Jewish lives is now supporting the candidate of antisemites and holocaust-deniers?

The people who founded AIPAC look on in horror, feeling like they’ve wandered into a Kafkaesque nightmare, where it’s like a bad joke. You have the biggest antisemitic attack in American history happening during Trump’s presidency, and there’s not a peep. Netanyahu made a statement of offering sanctuary to France’s Jews when hate crimes there rose slightly, but said nada about evaccing residents of Pittsburg after the massacre in a synagogue there. You’ve got an American-Israeli Jewish advocacy group supporting an American president who oversees, or arguably even incites, rising violence against Jews, and Israeli Prime Minister who turns a blind eye to it.

And Trump also put a lot of fear in America’s Jewish community for just the basic fact he was not a massive fan of democracy. He actively undermined democratic processes and norms, that were put in place to protect against a totalitarian regime. So suddenly after all these years of focusing outwardly on sustaining the democracy of Israel, American Jews start to realise that they’ve neglected their vigilance on the democracy of the USA.

So yeah, that’s where we are. And hopefully the tide is turning on AIPAC, and young activists are beginning to rise up against it. But holy shit, that is some journey.

Honestly, you need to watch this documentary. So interesting, what I’ve mentioned here is little more than the timeline it follows, there is so much more packed into the actual film. Including spying, the FBI, and backroom deals, the whole shebang. Highly, highly recommended.

I fell in love with the very first shot. The cinematography is so gorgeous, I was like, literally wherever this movie goes, I am in.

Neighbours tells the story of Sero’s first year of school. Set in Syria in the 80s, Sero is a 6-years-old Kurdish boy. We see the world through his eyes, as his whole world is his village, and his greatest wish is to get a tv to watch cartoons on.

The land he lives on was divided in his grandfather’s time by the English and French, and is now seperated into Syria and Turkey. Despite the fact they are close enough to see the Turkish border, they can’t get there to visit his mother’s family, who were on the wrong side when the border went up. Both states are virulently nationalistic, which leaves the stateless Kurds as a problem viewed with suspicion. Even when there is an annual holiday that allows relatives to speak across the barbed wire fence at the border, the guard orders, “Speak Arabic!” On the Turkish side they scream, “Speak Turkish!” Sero’s mother and grandmother speak neither language, and the absurdity is obvious to a child’s eyes.

A new teacher arrives at the village, aghast at what a backwater he’s been relegated to, and the obvious lack of nationalist enthusiasm from the residents. A Baathist zealot, he sets about posting photos of Asad everywhere, playing his speeches, and planting a palm tree in the playground. The palm tree is a symbol of Arab identity, and the teacher has a full-grown tree brought from the south to plant like a flag defiantly in this Kurdish village. “The palm tree grows everywhere on Arab soil,” he states proudly. Sero’s grandfather regards him, “It won’t survive our winter”.

The Baathist propaganda the teacher promotes is also viciously antisemitic. Opposed to the creation of the state of Israel on Palestinian land, all Jews become blamed as responsible, and viewed with suspicion by the regime. Jewish Syrians are stripped of their nationality, which effectively makes them non-persons in their own country, but also stops them from being able to apply for a passport to leave.

Sero’s next door neighbours are a Jewish family. They are as good as an extended family, with Sero as at home in their house as in his own. He comes over every Sabbath to light their lamps and stove in the evening. Their daughter Hannah is clearly in love with Sero’s uncle Alam. They stand sighing at each other across the garden wall.

The film begins by following the adventures of an ordinary 6-year-old. Seeing how high up a post he and his pals can pee. Making pictures with the set of paints Hannah gets him. Releasing balloons with the Kurdish colours near the border to bam up the soldiers, who machine-gun them.

The hardness of the world starts to creep in the edges of his innocence. The balloons are a good example. The children mull over their teacher’s rants, trying to figure our what Zionism and Imperialism are. His mate says they are two different kinds of scorpion, and he caught them once in a jar behind his outhouse. When the teacher asks how they are going to defeat the Jews, one kid suggests beating them at football.

Soon the darkness pushes further and further into Sero’s world. His teacher’s tales of Jews killing little children to use their blood in rituals, makes him hesitant to go next door to light lamps on Sabbath. Tragedy befalls the family, and his Uncle Aram mouths off about it, attracting the attention of the secret service. The village-world of Sero’s, which used to make sense, no longer seems to hang together or feel safe.

An amazing film, so well done. The cinematography is outstanding, the balloon dream sequence alone was stunning. The wee boy that plays the main character is fabulous! He’s so tiny, you can hardly believe he can convey so much emotion so vividly at such a young age.

A film about good neighbours and bad, about how respect for each other’s differences actually unites rather than divides. And at heart, a film about family, whether than be of blood or of choosing. Just a wonderful film.

The World Without You tells the story of a family coming together over a weekend for the one year anniversary memorial for their son who was slain overseas.

The son, Leo, was a war reporter who was killed in Iraq. The grief has caused his parents’ marriage to disintegrate, and they are now considering divorce. His three sisters quarrel constantly amongst each other, and there is a sense that he was both a buffer and the glue that held them all together. Returning home causes the sisters to regress into old dynamics, which grind up against the people they are now.

Clarissa and Nathan are struggling to conceive, and Clarissa’s mum keeps trampling tactlessly over that subject. Noelle has become super religious now that she’s moved to Israel, which makes Lily, an anti-Zionist atheist feel judged, which just escalates into both of them seeing each other as self-righteous and condescending. Noelle’s relationship with her husband Amram suffers, as Lily teases him about throwing himself into being more Jewish than anyone despite have grown up as bacon-loving Arthur.

Amram and Noelle’s relationship feels the most real of anyone’s there. He comes off as this whiny, smug, little manchild, but behind closed doors, you can tell all this is really getting to him. He has a total inferiority complex and is over-compensating at every turn. Which then becomes completely counter-productive as evidenced by his relationship with Lily. Because if he was just happy in his own skin, he could shrug and say, hey, I’m not the smartest guy in the world, I’m not an athlete, no I wasn’t always as religious as I am now, but hey, who cares? We all have our good points and bad. But instead it becomes this constant need to project an unrealistic self-image, and have his ego shored up, and dominate others in one-upmanship. It’s exhausting for his wife.

Noelle is stuck between wanting to defend and stand by the man she loves, and actually trying to get him to deal with real issues they are facing, like a lack of money because he is out of work. She gets sick of her husband always being treated like a joke, and herself and her marriage by extension. Yet at the same time, she has to ground him when his delusions of self-image stray towards the ludicrous. She spends so much time managing his issues for him, that she barely has any time to notice what she needs.

But when they’re alone and he can feel safe to be real with her, a totally different dynamic unfolds. They have intense sexual chemistry, and she really, truly loves him, and wouldn’t have any other man.

The whole family struggle to communicate, constantly descending into arguments, and pulling secrets from each other like teeth. Each sister in turn seems to articulate themselves better when talking their brother’s widow Thisbe, as though they are talking to their brother by proxy. But she has her own stuff to deal with, and is trying to work out how to break it to them that she’s moving in with a new man.

In some way, The World Without You is about the inconclusive nature of grief and family. While the delivery might be a little saccharin, the film says one of the reasons relationships are so hard and grief so lingering is that they are not given to resolutions, only transformations, and the accumulation of history. Even in death, it may end the person, but not the relationship, and his mother, his father, his sisters, their relationship with him is only transforming, not ending.

I went into this film knowing nothing and the last thing I expected to see was Kai Winn. Louise Fletcher is in this, as a good guy for once, and she’s great as always. Rod Steiger also appears as a Nazi colonel, bringing his signature moral ambivalence to the role. And Brett Marx, the kid who plays the film’s protagonist David, is also great, making believable a very naive and hopelessly idealistic character.

The other thing I didn’t expect was to laugh so much. This is actually really funny. Marx has great comic timing and physicality.

The film is about David, a Dutch Jewish boy who has seen one too many cowboy films. He practices for his bar mitzvah, then sneaks up onto the roof at night to practice his quick-draw. He falls asleep up there the night the Nazis come for the Jews of Amsterdam, and wakes in the morning to find himself alone in the world.

Saddling up his only belongings, he makes his way to a backwater town, where Louise Fletcher’s Mrs. Bakker takes him in and becomes his second mother. There, David’s cowboy fantasies come to life, and while working as her farmhand, learning to ride a horse and make a lasso.

But when the burgomeister draws him in to get his yellow star, the transformation is complete, and David imagines himself deputised the sheriff. When the Nazis arrive even in this peaceful little town, it comes down to its sheriff to stand up against the gang of no-goods.

Like Life is Beautiful, The Lucky Star is about children escaping into fantasy from the horrors of war. It is also a wish fulfilment for us as an audience, to see David take on Goliath, to see the innocent defeat the monstrous by the very virtue of that innocence. Surprisingly funny and surprisingly touching, a really enjoyable film.