Silencing enlightenment

Israeli films shed light on a society in conflict - yet they're becoming shunned, writes Julie Szego.

THE film that scooped the prize for best fiction short at this year's Melbourne International Film Festival, The Substitute, is set on an isolated army base in Israel. The drama focuses on a female recruit who desperately schemes for a transfer out of the place.

But her hopes for a crafty exit are scuttled when she's ordered to guard her substitute — a suicidal young woman — and events build to a jolting climax. With skill and economy, the film creates an impression of

a corrupt, callous and demoralised military. It's quietly subversive, you could say.

Israeli cinema has found its voice in recent years, and gained considerable international recognition. Tonight, a five-day long festival of Israeli cinema opens in Melbourne, an event that started three years ago and draws respectable numbers.

And yet, Israel's newfound celluloid status is already under threat for reasons that have nothing to do with the critics or the box office and everything to do with politics.

In Europe, film festivals have become battlegrounds, with curators blatantly discriminating against artists and subjecting their work to Stalinist-style scrutiny. In Europe, a film such as The Substitute might battle to reach the screen simply because of its country of origin. And it's not only Israelis who ought to be worried.

In recent weeks, film festivals in Edinburgh, Dublin and Locarno (Switzerland) moved to cancel visits from Israeli directors. Meanwhile, Greece announced its withdrawal from the coming autumn film festival in Haifa, just as the Israeli city was suffering sustained rocket attacks from Hezbollah.

And at the documentary film festival under way in Lussas, France, plans for a special program on Israeli films were scrapped and replaced with a program of Palestinian and Lebanese films. Festival chiefs explained the decision on the basis it was "difficult to look at films from the countries involved in the current war with the same degree of detachment".

The moves were a response to pressure from pro-Palestinian groups, which used the war in Lebanon to push for a cultural boycott of the Jewish state. In an online petition launched in the war's last days, Palestinian artists urged the international community "to join us in the boycott of Israeli film festivals, Israeli public venues, and Israeli institutions supported by the Government, and to end all co-operation with these cultural and artistic institutions that to date have refused to take a stand against the Occupation (of the territories), the root cause for this colonial conflict".

In a heavily subsidised industry such as film, this effectively means banning Israeli films and deeming their creators persona non grata.

Israeli academics are lucky in comparison. At least under the recent boycott passed by Britain's largest tertiary union they have the option of denouncing their country's "apartheid policies" to gain an exemption. Israeli filmmakers are given no such option; probably because too many are already busily denouncing.

Here's the inconvenient truth: many, if not most, of the Israeli films that end up on the festival circuit are strongly in opposition and quite a number are even co-productions with Palestinians.

Curiously, among the more prominent Palestinians who signed the boycott petition was Hany Abu-Assad, director of the award-winning Paradise Now, a film shot from the perspective of aspiring suicide bombers.

The film was made in collaboration with an Israeli producer and its marketing was partly financed by an Israeli Government arts fund; so is Abu-Assad calling for a ban on his own work?

One of the films cancelled at the Lussas festival was made by a Palestinian-Israeli who documents the lives of Israel's marginalised Arab minority.

And Israeli director Yoav Shamir, who was advised ("for your own sake") not to attend this week's Edinburgh film festival, has been described as "a trenchant critic of his government's policies" and a previous film of his, Checkpoint, "explicitly pro-Palestinian".

That description was reportedly used by the festival's artistic director, Australian Shane Danielsen, in resisting calls to go even further and cancel the screening of Shamir's latest film, 5 Days.

All of which appears to suggest that it's precisely the films themselves, and the circumstances of their production, which most trouble those who wish to cast Israel as a pariah state.

Contemporary Israeli cinema sheds light on a complex society in conflict, in which there's considerable room for empathy and collaboration with The Other. It doesn't quite fit a simplistic, one-dimensional, made-for-Hollywood narrative of abuser and abused.

Exactly why Europe's artistic elites are more than capable of looking at films from, say, China or Hezbollah's patron state,

Iran, or even Dubya's America with the "same degree of detachment" regardless of current events, but can't quite muster such nuance when it comes to Israel is anyone's guess.

Surely it's nothing less than their mission to uphold freedom of expression, promote dialogue and goodwill, mount their high horses and insist they won't bow to bullies.

Above all, I'd expect them to keep faith with film, which every now and then has the power to shift the most rigid perspectives. That they failed miserably on all counts bodes badly for everyone.