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Pictures Speak Volumes in Oscar-nominated Israeli Films

By Jonathan Cook | Dissident Voice |  February 20th, 2013

Israelis have been reveling in the prospect of an Oscar night triumph next week, with two Israeli-financed films among the five in the running for Best Documentary. But the country’s right-wing government is reported to be quietly fuming that the films, both of which portray Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories in a critical light, have garnered so much attention following their nominations.

Guy Davidi, the Israeli co-director of 5 Broken Cameras, one of the finalists, said industry insiders had warned him that pressure was being exerted on the Academy to stop the films winning the award.

“Many people in Hollywood are working very hard to make sure that neither film wins,” he said. “From Israel’s point of view, an Oscar would be a public relations disaster and mean more people get to see our films.”

The film is a searing account by Palestinian filmmaker Emad Burnat of a six-year period in his West Bank village during which the residents protested non-violently against an Israeli wall that cut off their farmland.

Israeli soldiers are shown beating, tear-gassing and shooting the villagers and solidarity activists.

The other Israeli-backed contender, The Gatekeepers, directed by Dror Moreh, features confessions by all six former heads of the Shin Bet, the main agency overseeing Israel’s occupation, since 1980. All are deeply critical of Israel’s rule over the Palestinians, with one even comparing it to the Nazis’ occupation of Europe.

Both films have won critical acclaim. This month The Gatekeepers won the Cinema for Peace Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival. The film has also been picked up by a major distributor, Sony Pictures Classics.

With the Israeli media abuzz over the country’s Oscar hopes, the columnist Gideon Levy observed: “This is not a matter of Israeli pride but rather of Israeli chutzpah. … Israel should be ashamed of what these movies bring to light.”

Despite the publicity, showings of the films in Israel have been mainly limited to circles of intellectuals and left-wing activists.

Davidi said requests to the education ministry to put 5 Broken Cameras on the civics curriculum had been rebuffed. That appears to be in line with official efforts to avoid drawing attention to the documentaries.

The culture ministry, run by Limor Livnat, a hawkish ally of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, broke its silence to make a short, caustic comment. A spokesman, Meir Bardugo, said: “Israeli cinema doesn’t have to be anti-Israeli.”

Responding to claims from local film executives that Livnat had put pressure on them to start making films showing Israel in “a sweeter light”, Bardugo added: “If Livnat would interfere, these two films wouldn’t get to the Oscars.”

Paradoxically for the government, Israel’s claim to 5 Broken Cameras is disputed. Emad Burnat, the other co-director, said: “It’s my story. I am Palestinian and the film is about the struggle of my village in Palestine. If it wins, it will be a victory for Palestine, not Israel.”

Unlike the Best Foreign Language Film category, Oscar-nominated documentaries are not classified according to country. 5 Broken Cameras received US$250,000 (Dh918,000) from Israeli and French government film funds.

Nonetheless, the dispute echoes previous Oscar controversies, including claims that the Academy refused to consider Elia Suleiman’s Divine Intervention in 2002 because it did not recognise Palestine as a state, and a statement by Skandar Copti, the Palestinian-Israeli co-director of Ajami, that he would not “represent Israel” in the 2010 Oscars.

Both 5 Broken Cameras and The Gatekeepers exploit to the full the exclusive access the filmmakers had to their subject matter.

The former records in troubling detail confrontations between the Israeli army and the villagers, including a sensational scene in which a soldier fires directly at Burnat. The bullet lodges in his camera lens and saves his life.

However, of the two films, The Gatekeepers has polarized opinion most sharply in Israel and among many American Jews because its criticisms of the occupation are made from consummate insiders.

At a festival screening in Jerusalem last year, some audience members were reported to have shouted “Traitors!” at the former Shin Bet heads who attended.

Writing in the US weekly The Jewish Press this month, the psychology professor Phyllis Chesler argued that the $1.5 million-budget film followed “a lethal narrative script against the Jewish state”.

But the CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour described The Gatekeepers as “full of stunning revelations”. It is rare for senior officials to break a code of silence designed to shield their activities from scrutiny.

The film was made in absolute secrecy, according to the director. “I knew I had dynamite in my hands.”

Moreh is scathing of Netanyahu for his inaction on Palestinian statehood, calling him “the biggest danger to Israelis”. The antipathy has apparently been reciprocated. Netanyahu’s spokesman has told the media that the prime minister has no plans to see the film.

Another new Israeli documentary, The Law in These Parts, which has been competing in festivals alongside 5 Broken Cameras and The Gatekeepers, is causing similar unease among officials.

In it, some of the country’s top legal minds admit that their job was to create arbitrary and oppressive laws to control Palestinians in the occupied territories.

Lia Tarachansky, an Israeli-Canadian filmmaker whose documentary Seven Deadly Myths interviews aging former soldiers about the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948, said the new films were groundbreaking: “For the first time people who know the system from the inside are providing a very precise, even clinical, picture of the structure of the occupation.”

She echoed Davidi’s fears that pro-Israel lobbyists were trying to stop critical films reaching a mainstream audience. “There is a lot of blind support for Israel in the industry.”

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He won this year’s Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism.

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February 20, 2013 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Academy Awards for the Promotion of Torture?

By Dave Clennon | Dissident Voice | February 16th, 2013

I’m a member of Hollywood’s Motion Picture Academy. At the risk of being expelled, for disclosing my intentions, I will not be voting for Zero Dark Thirty — in ANY Academy Awards category.

Everyone who contributes skill and energy to a motion picture — including actors — shares responsibility for the impressions the picture makes and the ideas it expresses. If I had played the role that was offered to me on Fox’s 24 (Season 7), I would have been guilty of promoting torture, and I couldn’t have evaded my own responsibility by blaming the writers and directors.

So Jessica Chastain won’t get my vote for Best Actress. With her beauty and her tough-but-vulnerable posturing, she almost succeeds in making extreme brutality look weirdly heroic.

There’s plenty of “Oscar buzz” around Zero Dark Thirty. Several associations of film critics have awarded it their highest honors. I have watched the film (2hrs, 37min). Although torture is an appalling crime under any circumstances, Zero never acknowledges that torture is immoral and criminal.  It does portray torture as getting results. The name of Osama Bin Laden’s courier is revealed (in the movie) by a “detainee,” Ammar, who has endured prolonged and horrifying torture.

The two lead interrogators, both white, are not torturing Ammar at the moment he gives up the name (Abu Ahmed), but he is still utterly depleted from at least 96 hours of sleep-deprivation, and he knows they will torture him again, if he resists. “Y’know, I can …  hang you back up to the ceiling,” says chief interrogator Dan.

The “moral” of this particular screen story? Torture sometimes works.  Not always. Later, the female interrogator (and Zero’s heroine Maya [Chastain]), supervises

the “enhanced interrogation” of another detainee, Faraj.  These are some of the enhancements we see her employ: first, a thick brown liquid is poured into a funnel which has been pushed into Faraj’s mouth and rammed part-way down his throat; then Maya supervises his beating and near-drowning (aka waterboarding); he gasps for air, gags, shudders and chokes.

Director Kathryn Bigelow then shows Chastain in a clean, well-lighted restroom, looking pretty, but tired and frustrated; Bigelow does not give us a view of Faraj after HIS ordeal.  Next we see Maya complaining to her mentor Dan that Faraj hasn’t cracked.  “You want to take a run at him?” she asks, smiling hopefully.)

In minute 45 of Zero, we learn that Faraj has “gone south.”  Maya’s relentless, merciless torture has finally killed her detainee.  She is now a murderer. So, for the next hour and 45 minutes, we’re rooting for a gorgeous, murdering thug to track down a charismatic, murdering jihadist.

If, in fact, torture is a crime (a mortal sin, if you will) — a signal of a nation’s descent into depravity — then it doesn’t matter whether it “works” or not. Zero Dark Thirty clearly condones torture. Not a single character involved in “The Greatest Manhunt in History” expresses any regret about the CIA’s use of torture. Maya/Chastain gets her man (code named “Geronimo”!) and that’s all that counts. The end justifies the vicious means.

Individuals and groups protesting the easy tolerance of torture in Zero Dark Thirty have been dismissed by some commentators as having “a political agenda.” The grievous problem presented by torture is NOT political.  It’s moral. And it’s criminal. Decent people of the left, the right, and the center would all judge the torture in Zero Dark Thirty as immoral and criminal.

If the deeply racist landmark film Birth of a Nation were released today, would we vote to honor it? Would we give an award to Leni Riefenstahl’s brilliant pro-Nazi documentary, Triumph of the Will? Hundreds of millions around the world watch the Oscars, we’re told.  Are we going to show the world that we Americans STILL approve of torture?

After Jessica Chastain won Zero Dark Thirty’s only Golden Globe Award, it occurred to me that she is the new face of American torture — as Kiefer Sutherland was, for several years.  If the Academy votes her an Oscar, it wouldn’t be surprising if the world community concluded that the U.S.A. still tolerates this vicious, criminal behavior.

Sometimes, it’s not just a movie.  And acting in it isn’t just a job. It’s a moral choice.

Dave Clennon can be reached at djjc123@earthlink.net.

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February 16, 2013 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Sacha Baron Cohen’s The Dictator — Shades of Fahrenheit 9/11?

By Maidhc Ó Cathail | The Passionate Attachment | March 9, 2012

In a recent Taki’s Magazine piece aptly entitled “The Not-so-Great Dictator,” Kathy Shaidle observes:

As for Baron Cohen: Before the Academy relented and let him to go to the Oscars in dictator drag after all, he put out an unfunny video denouncing the “Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Zionists.” It was supposed to be another example of the comedian’s fearless “guerrilla” humor. No one tells daredevil satirist Sacha Baron Cohen what to do—except maybe Paramount Pictures, whose logo is ever-so-faintly visible in the lower right corner of every frame.

Does this mean—gasp!—that Baron Cohen, Paramount, and the Academy cooked up the whole “controversy” from the beginning to publicize a movie that the star wasn’t “allowed” to publicize?

Why, it almost sounds like a conspiracy.

It reminds me of Jeff Gates’ observation in the must-watch “The Hate Mongers Among Us” about the “controversy” surrounding Michael Moore’s 2004 film on the motives for the war on Iraq:

Fahrenheit 911 was produced by Miramax, a Disney subsidiary. Miramax co-chairman Harvey Weinstein loudly claimed that Disney reneged on its promise to distribute Moore’s film. Disney chief executive Michael Eisner objected—just as loudly.

The high profile sparing between these two Hollywood titans dragged on for months in mainstream media. By the time the film was released, the interest generated by this “dispute” ensured that Moore’s film opened on a record number of screens for a “documentary.”

At virtually no cost, that public relations ploy helped ensure an international audience for a film that discredited not only the U.S. but also the office of the president. In its practical effect, the Moore film helped ensure there was virtually no mention of how key Zionist goals were advanced by this war—in plain sight.

As Michael Caine might say, not a lot of people know that Michael Moore’s agent is Ari Emanuel. Ariel “Ari” Zev Emanuel is the brother of former Israel Defense Forces volunteer Rahm Israel Emanuel and son of Dr. Benjamin M. Emanuel, a former member of the terrorist Irgun organization who famously commented on Obama’s appointment of his son as White House Chief of Staff, “Obviously he’ll influence the president to be pro-Israel. Why wouldn’t he? What is he, an Arab? He’s not going to be mopping floors at the White House.”

The son of an Israeli mother, Sacha Baron Cohen first acted with the Habonim Dror Jewish Labour Zionist youth movement and took part in Machon L’Madrichei Chutz La’Aretz (“Institute for Youth Leaders from Abroad”), an Israeli programme founded by the World Zionist Organization “to train a cadre of Zionist youth leaders who would go back to their home countries and work in the Jewish community to pass on Zionist values and promote immigration to Israel.”

As I noted previously, it appears that Baron Cohen is still passing on “Zionist values” with no small help from a like-minded Hollywood.

Update: Ari Emanuel is also Sacha Baron Cohen’s agent.

March 9, 2012 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Islamophobia, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , , , , , | Leave a comment