Category: UK JFF

Shalom Taiwan is a real heartwarmer. A rabbi’s temple is about to be foreclosed on in the latest financial crisis, and his usual round of donation-pleading to wealthy Americans falls on deaf ears, as they too feel the pinch. In his desperation, he follows a connection to Taiwan, where he tries everything to raise the funds needed.

I love that Rabbi Aaron is clearly a sincere man, wanting to do good, but there’s also a streak of ego which has found its way in, and contributed to this downfall. He’s clearly trying to live up to the reputation of the last rabbi, and has overextended the temple financially to do so. And everywhere he goes, he talks about what the temple does for the community, how it supports the community, how it holds together the community. But when it comes to saving the temple, he feels it is all on him. It shows a huge amount of sincere devotion and sense of responsibility, but also a conceit, that he alone holds up the temple. If the temple belongs to the community, why not let the community save it?

I love it because it is such a realistic and human flaw. And his journey to Taiwan makes him realise his mistakes. That there are more important things than money. That a community is a community whether it is in a upscale building or a one-room shack. That home is the place you put your priorities.

I was a bit worried going into it that the film might be a bit, you know, Live Laugh Love. But it manages not to stray too far into that territory, showing travel as a nourishing and transformative experience, without getting icky objectification vibes.

With a nice dusting of humour over it, Shalom Taiwan is just a simple and uplifting morality tale.

That was great! Oh, that was so much fun.

Shira decides to marry Maria after a whirlwind romance, but the path of true love never did run smooth. They’re still getting to know each other really, and virgin-til-now Maria isn’t exactly delighted to find out Shira is a mad shagger who’s been through half the lesbians in Israel.

Add to that, Shira’s lefty, Palestinian-sympathetic ass is the black sheep of her family, with her IDF soldier sister and her settler da (who, by the way, is played by John Carroll Lynch. Which I was like, “Is that John Carroll Lynch? What the fuck’s Twisty the Clown doing in an Israeli lesbian rom-com?”). The deepest cut is when her freespirited grandma, who she is really close to, goes berserk at her having given the ancestral wedding ring, which was brought through the Shoah, to a German she’s only known for 5 minutes. Shira was counting on her grandma to have her back when it came to the family, and instead has her as the fiercest critic.

Maria, on the other hand, is finding out what it is like to be a controversial topic. The gay thing is a non-issue, but will she convert? What did her grandparents do in the war? Will she stay in Israel? What did her grandparents do in the war? Will they have a traditional wedding? Oh, and have we mentioned, what did her grandparents do in the war?

Shira and Maria are still trying to figure out their own stuff, without the baggage of a century of history. But again and again, they keep coming back to the fact that despite all the odds, what they have between them feels like something worth fighting for. But is 3 generations enough to heal this divide?

Funny and sweet, warm and just a little schmaltzy, a lovely wee film.

That was absolutely fascinating.

Our Natural Right brings together the grandchildren of the founders who signed the Declaration of Independence, establishing the nation of Israel. It takes them through the document and asks whether the vision enshrined within it has been achieved, or if it has been let down, or if it contained within it the seeds of its own conflicts.

I had a bit of trepidation about watching this film, just from the synopsis and the title. I guess I thought it would be like an American thing, where everyone gets their dick hard over a piece of paper, and no one questions anything, and as they sing the national anthem, misty-eyed, the credits roll, with a tiny asterix saying three-fifths of a person were harmed in the making of this nation state.

But it’s actually nothing like that. Which I thought would be unlikely. Because even if you did have criticisms about how your country was formed, the last people to badmouth it are gonna be the nearest and dearest of the folk that did the job. You’re not gonna be like, “Grampa, great man, wonderful person, legislated like an idiot.”

But this documentary has people give very frank opinions from a wide variety of viewpoints, touching on the most sensitive topics in Israeli society. And I think that’s always important to remember. States like to present their people as a monolith in order to claim to act in their name, but there is actually a huge diversity of experiences and worldviews. And I think we don’t get to see that very much about Israel especially, so this made the film very compelling.

Another myth I think it exposes is the idea that it was inevitable that Israel ended up in the form we see it today. That it was almost predestined to be a state of endless war, apartheid and occupation. There are a lot of parts of the Declaration which are explicitly working against that kind of progression, and a lot of wiggle room to build protections in place. In fact the final document was not intended to be a tablet from on high, as it were, but guidance for a future constitution. Except a constitution never got written.

From a Scottish perspective, the State of Israel is about half as old as the building I went to school in. To me, the ink is still wet on that Declaration. So it’s good to see people check in and say, “How is this project going?” Because you are not inheriting a calcified social machine, you are inheriting a dream. And it is still very much up to you in what form you bring it forth.

Ooft! The opening credits weren’t even over and I was like, “Oh, I’m gonna greet at this.”

Truus Wijsmuller was a Dutch woman who was named Righteous Among Nations for saving 10,000 children from the Nazis.

It began when Jews were fleeing Germany, they began leaving their children at the border with Holland, hoping their kids could find a way across to safety. Many Dutch people heard reports of this, but Truus decided she had to do something about it. She got in the car, drove to the border, lifted the kids into the motor, hid them under her skirts, and drove home.

She set up a children’s home, where kids from all over were coming. The documentary interviews many people who spent their early years there.

Truus herself was this sturdy-set woman, the oft-repeated word used to describe her was “robust”. She had a “Don’t kick yer baw into my garden” vibe, but was the soul of pure compassion. She was determined, even bloody-minded, which she’d have to be to survive getting arrested by the gestapo, facing off against Eichmann, and aiding in the kindertransport. From the way folk talked about having to take their phone off the hook during dinner to be sure she wouldn’t phone looking for a favour, you get the sense she was a pain in the arse, but in the best way.

She simply knew what needed to be done and had the will to do it. And she acted like she was afraid of no one. She would press princes into doing her bidding, and talk back to Nazi officers, and tell gestapo jailers that she wanted to speak to the man in charge.

And she also seemed to be able to talk to anyone. She seemed to build enough rapport with Nazi officials that she could cross Europe, even with war on the horizon, and make arrangements to take kids to safety. She just seemed like a woman you didn’t talk back to.

And yet she never would have been able to do any of it, were it not for the fact that she seemed never to be acting in her own self-interest. Even towards the end of her life, she lived a very modest existence. But if someone needed a favour, she would ensure they got what they needed. You couldn’t help but give in to her, because you knew she was in the right.

The documentary tells of many incidents of her arranging safe passage for young children, often told by the people themselves who were saved. But the film climaxes with Truus’s incredible endeavour to evacuate her children’s home when the Nazis finally invade Holland. She is in Paris at the time. Now remember – it’s blitzkrieg, lightning war, and the German army conquered Holland in 4 days. Truus has to fly into a war zone, past everyone fleeing, to beg transport for her children to the last boat leaving IJmuiden, so they can flee to Britain. She finally gets buses, and ferries more than 70 children to the coast, dodging bombs and strafing from fighter planes, and the madness of a country collapsing into war.

Her achievements are extraordinary. She seems like an unbelievable character, but she just did unbelievable things. She showed what one person could do. When the war came, and history came, and in the face of a situation so overwhelming and hopeless, it made people say, “What can one person do?” Well, this is what one person can do. 10,000 children are alive because of her efforts. And their children, and their children after them.

A film that will bring you to tears for the best reasons.

Really struggled to get through this. Kept stopping and starting and walking away from this. Couldn’t stand watching this murderous bastard shrug off or chortle over the death of women and children at his hands.

I know he’s meant to be a controversial figure, but I think controversial is a word that should be reserved for people who aren’t unrepentant killers. It is a hard watch to see him go through his participation in the assassinations of Palestinian leaders and the murder of their families, the violation of the sovereignty of other countries to commit acts of terrorism that killed innocent people in their own homes who were at peace with Israel, and just gloss over it like, que sara.

And as politicians go, he’s one of the ‘good’ ones. He spends his time in office pushing for peace, and enters Camp David peace talks with Yasser Arafat, mediated by the USA, with the intention of bringing an end to the endless war the Occupation had made necessary.

So this guy, who from my viewpoint, is up to his elbows in blood, has his political career end in Israel because he is seen as too lenient and too accommodating. It makes you think, “Jesus, what is the appetite for death like?” if this guy can be a military general, the most highly decorated soldier in Israeli history, and be seen by the Israeli public as too peace-loving, a wet willy.

The film itself is really well put together, conveying emotion without straying into sentimentality, asking the viewer to make their own judgements on these decisions, while guiding us through why this person saw things from their perspective. Ehud Barak is honest and forthcoming about the realities of the situation, that he obviously did what he thought was right, and doesn’t lose sleep at the thought of the people dead by his hand, because if he did, he would never have got into the job of being General or Prime Minister in the first place. It’s very much laid on the line.

All in all, a difficult film. The questions it poses about whether men make history or history makes the man, are not of as much interest to me as the swath of death Barak leaves in his trail, and how accepted that seems to be.

Really interesting documentary looking into the history of the kibbutz.

Now, before seeing this, I had only a vague notion about what a kibbutz was like, combining ideas of settler colonies, summer camps, and hippy communes. Having now watched this film, you see the great range of kibbutz experiences, and how they changed over time.

I was also worried that the film would erase Palestinian existence completely, but it kinda brings it in as it explores how, as time went on, idealism and optimism gave way to a more critical view of the kibbutz.

So was a kibbutz religious or secular? Full of free love hippies, or conservative devotees? Made for the expansion of Israel, or a student holiday camp? The answer is all, yes, no, both, and different from place to place.

The documentary starts in the 60s where flower power and hippies combine with ideas of socialism in a new country which is seen a beacon of hope to people around the world. The idea of working together, sharing the work and sharing the benefits, in an environment of social equality was appealing to people. Young people especially saw it as a chance to come and contribute to a new country which would hopefully harbour in safety the Jewish people who had seen such horrors in the decades before.

They were sold the idea that they were going to open, virgin desert, and their job was to make it bloom and turn green, like a miracle of sheer idealism bearing fruit. No one seemed to question that maybe the land had never been desert, that it was already fertile, and whoever had previously been making it grow had been ‘relocated’.

But the wave of sheer joy and hope that comes off the volunteers is infectious, you really feel their belief that they were bringing a new world to bear, helping the dispossessed find a new home, in a new type of society, and that equality and common humanity would win out.

What a beautiful dream.

As the 60s roll around to the 70s, you see the drug and sex culture start to intensify. There is less of an engagement with the ideas of socialism, and more of an escape from society. So you have these communally raised kibbutzniks growing to sexual maturity, sometimes in religiously strict environments, mingling with this never-ending rotating cast of teenagers from around the world, whose ideas about sex are very different, and who are also on their summer holidays looking for a jolly. It was a fuckfest.

So too you get the waves of resistance from Israeli society to the kibbutz movement, as the positives are offset against the rising numbers of ‘mixed marriages’, as couples form between Jewish Israelis and gentile foreigners. This leads to two problems, the emigration of Jews from Israeli, or the immigration of non-Jews to Israel, which either way conflicts with the purpose of Zionism.

The concerns around miscegenation created the first inkling in the volunteers that maybe there was going to be a racism and discrimination problem in the Israel they were helping to build. And the shine really came off the apple during the Beirut massacre. Seeing Israel participate in war crimes against the Palestinian people in Lebanon made a lot of people wonder, hey, what if we’re not the good guys?

As the 80s rolled in, a colder cynicism took place in the culture, and a real analysis of what the kibbutz system had become. The communal life had devolved into a 2-tier system, with volunteers being given the shittiest jobs, and kept in substandard shacks, in some places referred to as ‘the ghetto’. The kibbutz extracted months or years of unpaid labour from people, many of whom were flocking to the kibbutz purely because they had nowhere else to go. With rising unemployment all across Europe, people with absolutely no hope were coming to the kibbutz to have the bare minimum of a roof over their head and food in their belly.

And someone said, hey, isn’t this a bit exploitative? As a former volunteer put it, the reason they were there was racism. They would rather hire white foreigners than Arab Israelis. Plus, it kept wages low if you have a massive unpaid migrant workforce. Far from the ideals of socialism it was founded on, the kibbutz movement was hugely damaging to the cause and conditions of workers.

So the whole thing starts to wind up, and as one spouse of a former volunteer puts it, with media coverage and the internet, watching the First and Second Intifadas, the Gazan War and countless killings, idealistic young people nowadays are far more likely to go and volunteer in a Palestinian refugee camp, than a kibbutz.

So ends a story that began with the best of intentions. A really fascinating look at a really interesting piece of history.

The vast majority of the action of The Unword takes place in an after-school parent-teacher conference, like a bottle episode. I was delighted to find it was really funny, despite being about the grim subject of antisemitic bullying. All the humour and drama unfolds as pompous, self-assured school officials sit down to put the world to rights, but find the world is a slippery customer and talks back.

Max outs himself as Jewish in a class lesson on the Holocaust, and meets with hostility from Karim, a Palestinian refugee kid. Max’s best mate Reza, who is Iranian-German, vows to stand by him, but as Karim forms a bloc between the Muslim minority kids and the white Jewish kids, Reza is swept up by social pressure. After lengthy bullying, which the school turns a blind eye to, Max finally lashes out, breaking Reza’s nose and biting off part of Karim’s ear. Hence the parent-teacher conference.

What I always found so frustrating at school, was the way adults would act like just because you were kids, you somehow didn’t live in the world. They would teach you about issues as if no one in the class knew anything about them, as if we were all visitors to planet earth and hadn’t set foot on it yet. Whether it was drink, drugs, bullying, or discrimination, they would act like we needed to be informed because we couldn’t possibly yet have experienced any of these things. In classes where there was a clear pecking order, one non-white kid, and everyone knowing whose parents were alkies or junkies. In primary school, we could all tell you who was poor, whose Mum raked bins, whose parents were mad, whose family was in and out prison, who stole, who sniffed glue, who was half-crazy already. And those realities were never acknowledged.

Something which The Unword captures perfectly. Because while the teacher seems perfectly at ease teaching about historical antisemitism, she can’t actually deal with the actual antisemitism she can see in front of her. The ‘unword’, one character explains, is Jew. Because “that’s not possible in Germany, because you can’t talk about Jews. Dead Jews in history books, fine. Living Jews, no way.”

What I liked about The Unword is no one in it is an arsehole. They might act like an arsehole, but it doesn’t let the audience off the hook by just making characters bad or caricatures. These are all people with their own traumas, with their own motivations, inheriting power dynamics they did not create.

Which is not to say any behaviour is excused, there is a clear and explicit condemnation of antisemitism and the complicit silence which tolerates it. But it shows up, both with humour and drama, how we have still yet to find ways of tackling these issues. The well-meaning but ineffective teacher is trying to teach about what happens when you ignore the dangers of antisemitism, in a class where she is ignoring antisemitism in order to get through her lesson plan.

The Unword starts with adults sitting down to calmly discuss the squabbles of children, only to find the issues their kids are facing are beyond their ability to resolve. With humour and warmth, The Unword takes us through an unpleasant subject, hoping we can laugh when we see our own awkwardness, and perhaps see it as less of a stumbling block to doing the right thing.