A New York Film Festival Focuses on Israelis and Palestinians
The Other Israel Film Festival (Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan, 334 Amsterdam Ave. at 76th St.) has never been your feel-good festival. Now, a year after the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre and hostage-taking spree followed by Israel’s utter decimation of Gaza, the Other Israel Film Festival, as never before, offers a demand for understanding, discussion, and openness to the “other.”
How appropriate that the film titled “The Other” opened the 18th Annual OIFF on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Dec. 5. (It was followed by Q&A with filmmaker Joy Sela and Palestinian peace activist Osama Elewat). Joy Sela, 38, a self-described “Type A” creative director & marketer turned filmmaker, spent six years interviewing Israeli Jews and Palestinians in Israel and the West Bank before Oct. 7. Then, this past summer, she returned to wed her American Israeli fiancé in Israel and stayed to interview many of the same people. This updated version post Oct. 7, seven years in the making, debuted Thursday.
If you crave an escapist feature with a heartwarming ending, this is not the film for you. “The Other” is a complex mosaic of Israeli Jews and Palestinians. Many have lost loved ones to the other, and have themselves been transformed in their perceptions of the enemy. We get the voices of a nine-member multi-cultural, multi-lingual rap group and the long haired, white robed Muslim holy man and his Jewish wife who’ve started bilingual Hebrew-Arabic kindergartens in Israel. One major silent presence is the Judean Desert. It’s beautiful, it’s harsh, this “Jewish Desert” in the West Bank. It appears and reappears to haunting music and superb aerial shots. For Sela, it’s a sacred place.
Sela says the film was part of her own transformation, starting with a Zionist upbringing in Minnesota and time in Israel throughout her 20s, the child of an Israeli father and a Jewish American mother. Over the years of interviewing came “the learning experience with a camera.”
She wants to use her own internal process of absorbing her subjects’ coming to understand themselves then to understand others to create “a shortcut for the viewer” to these connections. Sela says, “Separation is the biggest issue. Sometimes people just need to see what’s possible.”
As filmmaker-director-producer, with no background in filmmaking, she simply went and did it. With joint US-Israeli citizenship, presenting Western, she moved in and out of West Bank Palestinian towns. She says “I didn’t take that access and my freedom of movement lightly.” And, she says, traveling through checkpoints and into demonstrations sometimes broken up with tear gas and more, she was too naïve to be afraid, taking risks she didn’t know she was taking. Now working out of Miami and New York, she self-financed the documentary through her own marketing company up to the editing.
Missing from the huge number of interviewed and re-interviewed Israelis and Palestinians are Israel’s Ultra Orthodox. Sela says during her time filming, she did not come across any Ultra Orthodox individuals in Israeli-Palestinian engagement, the film’s focus.
Even without the Ultra Orthodox, the film offers plenty of thought-provoking moments. From one Israeli woman: “You can choose to die with your child. Many people do.” From a Palestinian bereaved brother: “I couldn’t imagine that Jewish people had tears.” From a former IDF soldier now part of Combatants for Peace: “Giving up on revenge is considered disloyal to the loved ones lost.” And powerful visuals — the aerial shot of the 30,000 women marching for Women Wage Peace.
The festival, under Isaac Zablocki, director of the JCC’s Israel Film Center, includes four other related films. “The Path Forward” will be screened both at the JCC and the Brooklyn Heights Synagogue.
Women are truly well represented. Six of the festival’s 11 films were directed by women, and one co-directed. Tamar Baruch’s “Her Name Was Zehava” is the documentary of a young trans woman denied asylum in Israel and imprisoned for her second class status as a Palestinian after fleeing the West Bank. Zohar Brown directed the breakthrough “The Bibi Files,” documenting the working of Netanyahu’s inner circle as he destroys democracy. “Egypt. A Love Song” is the documentary of popular 1940s Jewish Arab singer Souad Zaki, forced to flee to Israel. The director is her granddaughter, Iris Zaki. “Savoy,” Zohar Wagner’s docudrama tells the forgotten story of the heroine of the deadly 1975 Hotel Savoy terrorist attack in Tel Aviv. Two of the films directed by men focus on women: Eliezer Yaari’s “The Checkpoint Women: Memories,” documenting the Machsom Watch (Checkpoint Watch) Israeli women who safeguarded the rights of Palestinians. Omri Dayan’s “Seven Jewish Children” is based on the Caryl Churchill play about seven daughters in key moments over a century.
Lest we think that the Israel-Palestine conflict remains insoluble, a few words of hope from lessons learned with an end to The Troubles in Northern Ireland. Rooted in centuries of religious and political conflict between the ruling Protestants and the minority Catholics, change bubbled up from the grassroots.
If Sela’s “The Other” leaves viewers asking, “What’s the solution?” Esther Takac’s “The Narrow Bridge” gives some inspiring direction. Like Sela, a first-time, female filmmaker, she completed the documentary in 2022, then updated it after Oct. 7. An Australian trauma psychologist who’s worked with Israelis and Palestinians and authored three books, she concentrated her film on the transformation of two Israelis, two Palestinians, each devastated by the murder of their loved ones. They eventually embraced their opposite, saying, “We feel the same pain, the same wound.” They found their way to Israeli Palestinian Bereaved Families, gathering publicly to hostile Israeli demonstrators screaming “Traitors, bastards.”
Bashra, whose teenage son was killed just outside her home in the West Bank, was married at 14, now a mother of many children. Speaking out for reconciliation, she went from never having flown on an airplane to speaking worldwide to gatherings of thousands. All four have become their best selves. As one of them says, “This is how you use your pain to build a bridge between people.”
And in the words of Leonard Cohen, performing in Tel Aviv, captured in the film, “This is about a response to human grief. A radical, unique and holy, holy, holy response to human suffering.”
Other Israel Film Festival details including schedule of films and discussions: Otherisrael.org
Photo courtesy of Joy Sela // “The Other”
