Israel Had Three Films in Cannes. Their Directors Used Them Against It
Cannes picked one Arab film and three Israeli ones, and some cried bias. The Israeli directors, fierce critics of their government, used the festival to denounce Israel.
In recent years the Cannes Film Festival has shown a number of Arab films in its official selection. So its choice of a single Arab film for this year’s main competition, Nabil Ayouch’s Moroccan Casablanca Beats, shocked the Arab film industry, and some accused the festival of favouring Israel, which had three films in its official programme: Ahed’s Knee in the main competition, Let It Be Morning in Un Certain Regard and Black Notebooks among the special screenings.
A closer look at those Israeli films reveals that their directors are anti-Zionist Jews and among the fiercest critics of the Israeli government and its oppressive policies towards the Palestinians. Shlomi Elkabetz, the director of Black Notebooks, told me he refused to take part in any of the events of the Israeli delegation, which came to the festival headed by the culture minister. He attended only one party, to meet the minister and demand the repeal of the law that imposes an Israeli identity on the films of Palestinian directors funded by the state film fund. That law, he said, has forced some of those directors to emigrate to Europe in search of funding that allows them to present their films at international festivals as Palestinian films reflecting their reality, culture and civilisation. One of them is Maysaloun Hamoud, whose film In Between Elkabetz produced in 2016.
An Arab Jew on the Croisette
Elkabetz rejects Zionism and considers himself an Arab Jew. His family came from Morocco to Israel in the early 1950s and faced racial discrimination in a state dominated by European Ashkenazi Jews. Israel, he insists, is still a racist state in every area of life, including the film industry, where every director is a white European Jew except for two Arab Jews. “I grew up watching Israeli films that were always told from the point of view of the white Jew, and I never saw myself in them. That’s why To Take a Wife, which I made with my sister Ronit in 2004, came as a shock to Israeli society: its heroine behaved like a Jewish woman raised in an Arab home, unlike any Ashkenazi woman,” says Elkabetz, who made a trilogy with his sister exploring the life of a Moroccan Jewish woman from her marriage to her divorce.
In his latest film, Black Notebooks, he records his career with his sister, who died of lung cancer in 2016, and their search for their identity as Arab Jews and their bond with their parents’ homeland, Morocco.
Biting the hand that feeds
Nadav Lapid, the director of Ahed’s Knee, is known for the scathing criticism of Israel, its government, its culture and its art in his films, which portray it as a morally corrupt state devoid of civilisation. His film won the Jury Prize at Cannes, yet it was condemned by American critics, who considered it hostile to Israel and accused Lapid of biting the hand that feeds him, because the state film fund helped finance it.
Ahed’s Knee evokes a Knesset member’s suggestion that the Palestinian activist Ahed Tamimi, jailed for slapping an Israeli soldier, deserved a bullet in the kneecap to cripple her for life. It tells the story of an anti-Zionist Israeli director who is casting an actress to play Ahed in a film about her when he travels to a remote desert village to present one of his films, where an official of the culture ministry asks him to sign a form listing the only subjects he may discuss. For almost two hours, the film denounces the corruption of the Israeli government and the ugliness of the occupation, shows the courage of the Palestinian resistance, belittles Israeli art and culture and mocks their shallowness.
A Palestinian story under an Israeli flag
But the film that stirred controversy, and whose screening became a protest against the Israeli law that imposes an Israeli identity on films funded by state institutions, was Eran Kolirin’s Let It Be Morning. Its Palestinian cast refused to attend its screening at the festival because it was presented as Israeli, although it tells a Palestinian story, adapted from a novel by the Palestinian writer Sayed Kashua. Kolirin calls it a film about “the state of siege”, the phrase of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.
The film tells the story of Sami, a Palestinian with Israeli citizenship who lives in Jerusalem. He travels with his wife and son to his home village for his brother’s wedding and gets stuck there when the Israeli army lays siege to the village and its soldiers stop him from returning to Jerusalem. He loses his job, his son is kept from school and he falls into trouble with his family.
Kolirin, known for The Band’s Visit, which screened in the same section in 2007 and tells the story of an Egyptian band stranded in a remote desert town on a visit to Israel, declared his solidarity with his Palestinian cast and denounced the Israeli law as oppressive. “No government has the right to impose its identity on an artist or on a work of art,” he said at a press conference.
So although Israel had three films at Cannes, it lost more than it gained from them. Its directors used the world stage of Cannes to denounce Israel and its oppressive laws, to scorn its art and to expose its injustice towards the Palestinians and the ugliness of its occupation of their land.
More on UKScreen
Cinema · 2021How did Palestinian cinema evolve from local revolutionary films into a global art cinema?
Cinema · 2013Lebanese and Iranian Directors take the spotlight at the Jerusalem Film Festival.
Cinema · 2026Gaza Dominates the Oscar International Race
Cinema · 2026Israeli Filmmakers Hunted at Home and Boycotted AbroadMost read on UKScreen
Get the best of UKScreen by email
New stories, reviews and interviews from the archive, straight to your inbox.
1 Comment
Comments are closed.