Entries associated with the tag "Israel":

Viewing some very different documentaries at this year's Toronto International Film Festival, I was reminded just how essential theatrical nonfiction films have become in this age of instant TV sound bites and Internet replays. Being the first with the story doesn't mean being the best, and as far as broadcast news is concerned, there's rarely time for adequate background. Perspective improves with reflection.

Filmmakers Richard Parry and Vaughan Smith had 15 years to polish the story of Blood Trail; the two British correspondents first met their subject, American war photographer Robert King, in Sarajevo in 1993. At that time King was a charming but naive art school graduate inspired by Robert Capa and determined to bag a Pulitzer. Parry, Smith, and the rest of the press corps thought he wouldn't last, but King survived his learning curve and, working several continents, gradually earned respect for his tenacity, resourcefulness, and uncanny knack for being in the right war zone at the right time.

What makes Blood Trail exceptional is its behind-the-scenes look at how the news business has changed over time and how its pressures and dangers change its practitioners. We watch a boyish King grow into a weathered cynic and see his ability to capture telling images compromised by having to work while embedded in U.S. military operations in Iraq. This trenchant portrait was to be featured in the current Chicago International Film Festival, but the filmmakers withdrew it to limit festival exposure, hoping to get into the higher-profile South by Southwest and Sundance. That's a loss for Chicago, but it's also the road to snagging commercial distribution and reaching a wider audience.

Another Toronto documentary entry that delved much deeper than the headlines was Leon Geller and Marcus Vetter's The Heart of Jenin, a moving tale of a grieving Palestinian father who saved five lives. In 2005, 12-year-old Ahmed Khatib died in Jenin in the West Bank after an Israeli soldier mistook the boy's realistic toy gun for a Kalashnikov assault rifle and opened fire. Ahmed's father, Ismael, was persuaded by an ER physician to donate Ahmed's vital organs to area residents in need of transplants, including a young girl from a Druze village, a Bedouin boy in the Negev, and a tiny Orthodox Jewish girl in Jerusalem. Over the years the recipients grow healthy and Ismael finds meaningful work running a children's educational center in Jenin; the film culminates in his meetings with the children's families. The Israeli-American Geller and his German codirector Vetter artfully blend archival shots from local news with contemporary footage to paint a fuller picture than the initial TV coverage could. The stated purpose of the film is to foster peace in a divided region, but the Khatibs' story has also promoted progress in another corner of the world: business magnate Sultan Al Qassemi of the United Arab Emirates recently cited Ismael's decision in an op-ed urging the UAE to adopt organ donor legislation.

Ari Folman's animated documentary Waltz With Bashir (which I wrote about in an earlier post) is in the news again: this memoir about Israel's first war in Lebanon recently won six Ophirs from the Israeli Film Academy, including Best Movie, which automatically makes it Israel's Oscar submission for Best Foreign Language Film. But it's been shut out of the Oscar competition for Best Documentary because of changes in the eligibility rules, which stipulate that a nonfiction feature must screen for one week each in Los Angeles and New York before August 31. The new rule creates a dilemma for filmmakers hoping to play a prestigious fall festival like Telluride, Toronto, or New York, all of which value premieres; producers must now decide whether they want to bypass early reviews in the international press and open their films in the U.S. during the dog days of summer. Winning an Oscar can mean a great deal to a documentary, but as Alex Gibney found with his 2008 winner Taxi to the Dark Side, it doesn't guarantee box office returns. Gibney wound up suing his distributor, THINKFilm, for not capitalizing adequately on his win.

After six and a half days at the 33rd Toronto International Film Festival, I'd had enough. In other years I'd stayed for the entire ten days, but heading back to Chicago after 33 movies, I felt I'd seen almost all the entries that were my priorities, confirming my sense that the 2008 festival, though good, lacked the "wow" factor of last year. A sign of a great festival is that you leave wanting more.

I first started going to Toronto a dozen years ago, and this visit didn't stack up to a number of previous trips. That's not a knock on TIFF's programmers: they pick movies only from what's available and ready by Toronto's deadline (and not claimed by another festival insisting on exclusivity). If it's a so-so year at Cannes, you can't expect Toronto to pull rabbits out of a hat four months later. The key to maximizing your TIFF experience is choosing films in advance, making a schedule, and sticking to it. The 249 features on offer unspooled in venues scattered across the city, which requires, in the space of concentrated 12- to 15-hour working days, factoring in enough travel time so as not to get shut out of full houses. Miss one screening, and you may not find another that doesn't cause a conflict elsewhere down the line. For most journalists, that leaves little room for selections based on personal preference. Yet, thanks to the city's efficient, frequent, and easily navigable subway, I still saw much to admire.

My favorite film, Danny Boyle's exhilarating Slumdog Millionaire, arrived at Toronto with American distribution already in place, and the first press and industry screening was packed almost to capacity, a sign of robust word-of-mouth. From the director of Millions, 28 Days Later, and Trainspotting, this is a crowd-pleaser of Dickensian sweep: its hero, an uneducated, lower-class Mumbai chai wallah (or tea server, played as an adult by Dev Patel), keeps winning on the Indian version of TV's Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? because his memories of adversity (related in flashbacks) inspire him to answer the host's questions correctly. With a large cast of characters and a bounty of themes—poverty, sibling rivalry, religious intolerance, child exploitation, star-crossed romance, globalism—Slumdog Milliionaire is a sprawling, ambitious epic, and a testament to the power of faith, hope, and tenacity. Plus, the end credits roll over a Bollywood musical number. Ticket buyers voted it the People's Choice Award winner.

Kim Jee-woon's South Korean box office hit The Good, the Bad, the Weird was one of two westerns I saw, and its tongue-in-cheek homage to spaghetti westerns got the drop on Ed Harris's muted Appaloosa. Kim brings together three top Korean stars—Song Kang-ho as a bumbling train robber, Lee Byun-hung as a stylish assassin, and Jung Woo-sung as a laconic bounty hunter—in a rousing adventure set in 1930s Manchuria, where the occupying Japanese army joins the chase for a stolen treasure map. Of all the movies I saw in Toronto, this was the most fun.

My three other top festival picks are considerably more serious. The somber Austrian thriller Revanche by Gotz Spielmann begins in a Viennese brothel, where an errand boy (Johannes Krisch) is secretly involved with one of the immigrant hookers (Irina Potapenko). To raise money to escape their situation, he robs a bank, but the job goes awry when a policeman (Andreas Lust) notices the illegally parked getaway car. The thief's scheme for revenge against the cop transforms several relationships in surprising ways during the course of a story about redemption and healing.

Hunger, the directing debut of British artist Steve McQueen, is a controversial, searing drama based on the life of IRA member Bobby Sands, who in 1981 led a hunger strike among fellow Irish convicts to protest Britain's refusal to recognize them as political prisoners. McQueen and cowriter Enda Walsh masterfully shift the point of view from one inmate to another as the prisoners are humiliated and ritually brutalized. One extended scene, a heartbreaking conversation between Sands (Michael Fassbender) and a priest (Liam Cunningham), encapsulates the tragic history of "the troubles." Not for the faint of heart, Hunger is a period piece that's also topical in condemning torture. All the performances are rock solid, but Fassbender, who lost a shocking amount of weight during production, is the standout. Hunger won the Diesel Discovery Award, given by the festival press corps.

From Israel comes Waltz With Bashir, Ari Folman's devastating, surrealistic blend of animation and documentary based on his traumatic tour of duty in the Israel Defense Forces during the first war in Lebanon. In cartoon form, Folman and several of his real-life fellow soldiers confer 20 years later to try to unearth buried memories. The movie brings to mind both Richard Linklater's Waking Life, another series of introspective conversations, and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, another wartime memoir, though these comparisons are inadequate. Waltz With Bashir is a groundbreaking film that raises the bar for animation, tracing the complex political factors that led to the horrific massacres of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Unsettling, graphic, and adult, it's not appropriate for younger viewers—unless, perhaps, you want to teach them to abhor war. Were it only that simple. 

Finally, a movie-star president I can live with. Last week Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter arrived at the Toronto film festival for the world premiere of Jonathan Demme's Man From Plains, which documents the ex-president's U.S. book tour to promote his hackle-raising Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid (2006). Just before the screening, the Carters appeared at Ryerson Theater for an onstage interview with TVO talk show host Allan Gregg. After a few days of watching entertainment journalists jockey for position to interview George Clooney and Cate Blanchett, I was gratified to see the Carters get a long and heartfelt standing ovation.

Demme certainly chose an opportune time to follow Carter around: the Palestine book was roundly attacked by pro-Israel partisans for daring to compare the treatment of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip with South African apartheid, though it's evident from the movie that few of the journalists who interviewed him bothered to read much more than the title. In one sequence Carter appears on Wolf Blitzer's CNN program The Situation Room and, politely but firmly, corrects Blitzer's facts time and again. Despite Carter's reputation as a wimpy chief executive, he's pretty tough when it comes to making his arguments understood and dispelling other people's distortions.

I was particularly surprised by the depth of Carter's Christianity in the movie; Demme shows him taking to the pulpit at Maranatha Baptist Church in Virginia and leading people in prayer at a Georgia picnic. Carter was just as vocal about his faith at Ryerson, declaring, "I worship a Christ who was the prince of peace, not preemptive war." He drew a thick line between his own faith and that of fundamentalists who subjugate women and feel they have a direct line to God. It was quite a contrast from the previous afternoon at Ryerson, when comedian Bill Maher and Borat director Larry Charles spent an hour and a half lampooning the very notion of religion.

Asked about the experience of being filmed for the movie, Rosalyn declared with characteristic bluntness, "I didn't like it at all." Demme was granted unlimited access to Carter during the filming and had final cut of the movie, and Rosalyn expressed some disappointment that the finished product didn't spend more time on the Carter Center, now celebrating its 25th anniversary. Demme spends most of his time on the controversy over the book, with flashbacks to the 1978 peace accords Carter brokered between Israel and Egypt. Yet the movie covers a lot of ground, including not only the ex-president's upbringing in Plains but his 1980 electoral defeat to Ronald Reagan, his ultimate vindication with the Nobel peace prize, and the Carters' recent work with Habitat for Humanity building homes in New Orleans. At Ryerson, Carter recalled that their last building project was supposed to take five days, but after Brad Pitt showed up to help, they had so many volunteers that they were finished in four.