The selection: A train journey inside an apartment; an alter boy who questions his faith after finding a fake Easter egg; a skateboarding-obsessed Palestinian Israeli dates a Jewish woman; a pre-Bar Mitzvah boy struggles with erotic dreams; a guard at a secret torture center falls in love with a prisoner; a man trains to be a certified Jewish undertaker and work with the dead; another sets up a fake Hamas missile launch to get into a bomb shelter with the object of his desire; a politician stumbles upon a prepared obituary of himself; a documentary on Israel’s contested 443 highway; a spy is secretly arrested after an Israeli Defense Ministry event in his honor; a Bedouin documentary; and more.
The repertoire of new Israeli films at this year’s Jerusalem Film Festival is vast, diverse and bewildering.
Israeli film has gone through a renaissance of sorts over the past decade. From a country known for low-tech, formulaic war movies, Israeli filmmakers have become major players on the global cinematic stage, with compelling feature films making the short lists at the world’s major festivals each year. Ajami, Waltz with Bashir, Lebanon and Beaufort are just a few of the Israeli films to have won major international prizes over the past three years.
Israelis love foreign films. Some 200 feature films are imported each year, 68 percent of which are American and another 23 percent of which are European. But for a country obsessed with Hollywood and with just over 7 million people, Israel is host to 120 production companies; 10 production studios; 30 post-production companies; and 10 distribution companies. Around 15 full length feature films come out of Israel each year, along with another 400 hours of television fiction and drama; 120 hours of documentary films; and 10 hours of animation. Through cooperation agreements with 10 mostly Western European countries, the country co-produces another 3-5 full length feature films and 5-10 documentaries each year.
One of this year’s most unique contributions to the Israeli film library is The Golden Pomegranate, billed as the world’s first feature film about Israel’s creation from the perspective of a Sephardic Jewish family.
Based on Dvora Waysman’s novel The Pomegranate Pendant, the film tells the story of Mazal, an 1880s Jewish child-bride from Sana’a, Yemen, who heads to Jerusalem with her new husband. The film follows the couple’s arduous trek through the desert and on to Palestine, their difficulties being accepted by the small but Ashkenazi-dominated Jewish establishment in Jerusalem, and a long series of dramas that unfold over four generations through the establishment of the State of Israel.
“I read Dvora’s book in 1996 and I thought it was terrific and would make a great movie,” Producer Robert M Bleiweiss told The Media Line. “Fourteen years later here we are, and it’s an epic.”
Indeed, with 48 speaking parts and 300 extras, a compelling film comes through, particularly remarkable for its 600 costumes, impressive set design and dazzling Yemenite music.
“The aesthetics, the music, the body language—everything was unique,” Timna Brauer, an Israeli singer who played an older Mazal told The Media Line.
The saga centers around Mazal’s struggles to make it as a single mother after her husband’s sudden death. The mother of two, Mazal struggles against a male-dominated society that doesn’t deem it appropriate for her to remain widowed and take on her husband’s jewelery business. Mazal grapples with Christian missionaries, a daughter who is loosing her sight, a son who gets in fights with Jerusalem Palestinians and eventually a grandson involved in the anti-British Jewish underground. Mazal passes a golden pomegranate to the women in her family on the day they each marry.
The story is a refreshing take on Israel’s birth narrative, which is incessantly represented in Israeli film through the eyes of Ashkenazi Jews or framed in the context of Western-European Jewish history.
“This is the first full length Yemenite feature film, and I feel a sense of personal mission,” Galit Giat, a famous Israeli actress who played a younger Mazal told The Media Line.
The film has engendered considerable in buzz Israel’s Yemenite community, and Tuesday’s premier at the festival was packed, with a few dozen elderly Yeminite women waiting outside the screening hall in hope they would be let in at the last minute.
“With our luck there are more people than there are seats but in the spirit of the [Yemenite] ethnicity we will find a place for everyone,” Director Dan Turgeman, an Israeli film star, told the crowd at the premier. “Every time a movie like this makes it to the big screen it’s a miracle because of the process, the money… and this is not a film that was produced according to Hollywood standards.”
While the film is admirable, engaging and certainly doesn’t shout ‘Hollywood!’, its principal let-down is a failed attempt to appeal to Western, English speaking audiences.
The English script, performed by an almost entirely Israeli cast, significantly weakens the film’s potential impact, making a number of scenes which could otherwise have been gripping in Hebrew (or Arabic) come across as awkward, comical or even a bit ‘cheesy.’
Bleiweiss, the film’s producer—an author and the former editor of the now defunct Jewish Spectator—argued the film needed to be in English in order to compete.
“It’s a great question and the language was deliberated over with great debate,” he told The Media Line. “There was enormous pressure to make it in Arabic and Hebrew. The problem is that international movies like this are still made in English. While the world is changing slowly, people still have a lot of difficulty with subtitles. That’s the nature of the commercial appeal of movies and we couldn’t get our money back if we did it in Israel only. In the end, I was persuaded to make it in English.”
Indeed, succumbing to market-based pressures to film in English is understandable, and such a decision would certainly be justified if a film’s reach would be significantly expanded by filming in English.
But this seems unlikely in this case. While the film is without question a notable achievement, it is not about to win at Cannes. Bleiweiss is new to film production; Turgeman is relatively inexperienced as a director; and while some of the actors were impressive, others were manifestly disappointing.
Performance aside, the mainstream ‘Cinemax’ in your average Western urban center is not exactly itching to put a film about a Yemenite Jewish woman’s struggles in the 1880’s on three screens…
Audiences in Israel, Yemen and throughout the Middle East and North Africa, where people speak Arabic and Hebrew are, on the other hand, quite likely to find this gem of a story appealing.
The Golden Pomegranate is certainly worth seeing, but it will likely end up being judged as a film that tried to be what it is not, rather than the humble, beautiful, locally-based and targeted production it could have been had Bleiweiss taken the risk of filming in the languages in which Mazal lived her life.