Filmmaker Guy Davidi’s politics can fall hard on Jewish ears.
“I am known to be an objector of Israeli politics,” the Oscar-nominated Israeli director said last week during a Skype call from France, where he was raising money for his near-finished project, “Mixed Feelings.”
“I’m known among the [Israeli] filmmaking community to be one of the most radical on the map,” he added, not so much as a badge of pride but a point of fact. “I have objected to the wars clearly; I’ve spoken out about the need to raise resistance to Israeli [policies] and, in some cases — not in all cases — I even supported boycott.”
No doubt, that last line will scarlet-letter Davidi in certain circles, or perhaps prompt a boycott of the rest of this column.
But as a Jewish artist living in modern Israel, in geopolitical circumstances Davidi described as “an urgent situation,” he said he feels tremendous responsibility to take a stand in his life and in his work — even if it has made him somewhat radical, somewhat fringe. He describes himself as both “pro-Israeli” and “pro-Palestinian.”
“By expressing objection to the occupation and putting pressure on the Israeli government, to me, this is the most pro-Israeli opinion that you can have.”
Davidi is the co-director, along with Palestinian Emad Burnat, of the documentary “5 Broken Cameras,” which was nominated for an Oscar in 2013. The film, which also won the best documentary award from the Jerusalem Film Festival, was hailed for its artistic ingenuity — it shows Palestinian life in the West Bank town of Bil’in as viewed through the eyes of civilian cameras — even as it earned condemnation from critics for its lack, or utter dismissal, of neutrality. Watch the film and it is clear: It was never meant to be neutral. Rather, it is what New York Times film critic A.O. Scott described as “a piece of advocacy journalism.”
In Davidi’s view, it is the Palestinians who need redeeming, and the Israelis who are responsible for that redemption.
A few weeks ago, I received an email that claimed Davidi was having difficulty financing his latest film. In a video posted on indiegogo.com, an online fundraising platform, Davidi tells the camera that despite the success of “5 Broken Cameras” (it also won a Sundance directing award and an International Emmy), he has “been struggling to find Israeli financing.”
“When you make political films, you become an outcast,” Israeli-based filmmaker and writer Marat Parkhomovsky says in the video of Davidi’s work. “The government is opposed to this kind of political filmmaking.”
So it came as a surprise when I finally reached Davidi in France and he blamed the lack of Israeli financing more on lack of funding, period, than a government-sponsored pox on his personal politics. Like so many auteurs before him, Davidi is forced to seek funding from flush European film funds the same way Woody Allen does (though cynics may infer Europe is only too delighted to support Davidi’s Israel-critical work).
Even the title of his forthcoming documentary — “Mixed Feelings” — is itself a powerful comment on shifting Jewish attitudes toward Israel. On the surface, it tells the story of the Israeli director, writer and acting coach Amir Orian, who created an alternative theater laboratory known as The Room Theater in his Tel Aviv home. In classes, he encourages students to use performance as a way of both channeling emotions and challenging political paradigms. In a clip from the film, Orian can be seen telling a room full of students, “I want to ask that you stop automatically identifying with what the state does.”
It isn’t so much a critique of Israel, as a critique of noncritical thinking. And, in some sense, the film appears to be as much about Davidi himself and how deeply he identifies with another artist using the tools available to him to activate social change. If you are an artist, and you live in Israel, Davidi believes there is an additional burden to bear in the need to subvert the status quo.
“I would say very simply that I am a responsible filmmaker,” he said. “I think in this extreme situation, where I live, [politics and conflict are] harder to ignore. It’s harder to say, ‘I’m not gonna to deal with it. I’m gonna make artistic films not dealing with occupation, with militaristic society, with economic pressure.’ You can make that decision easier in other places. In my films, I think, there is an expectation, and kind of a hidden call: that things can change, and there can be a good reality if we take [the right] path. But, in order to take that path, we have to go through the process of looking at ourselves in the mirror.”
Davidi is implacable in his insistence on Israel bearing the bulk of responsibility for creating peace with the Palestinians. He rejects the moral equivocation of who’s wrong, who’s right on a number of issues, and he thinks people who use words like “complicated” and “complexity” are avoiding taking a stand. Is there any validity, I asked him, to arguments made by Israelis and Jews on a different side than his?
“There are other sides, of course there are other sides,” he said. “We live in a complex world. The reality is complex. There are contradictions — I live contradictions daily. It doesn’t mean I don’t see where the responsibility [is] of myself and of my country, and where the balance of power [lies]. And the balance of power is not equilibrium — there is no balance. There’s no equality. I don’t accept this argument of ‘who’s right’ and ‘who’s wrong’; we [Israelis] also are right, and they [Palestinians] are also wrong. I don’t look to see who’s right and who’s wrong. I’m trying to find a solution for the people in this land, and in this land it means both Palestinians and Israelis.”
No mixed feelings about that.
