Features

The home front

Justice and guilt at Jewishfilm.2006

By MATTIAS FREY | April 18, 2006

Space and place, journeys and returns structure and punctuate Jewishfilm.2006, which will screen April 22-30 at Brandeis’s Edie and Lew Wasserman Cinematheque, the Harvard Film Archive, and the Goethe-Institut Boston. A number of the 15 features, documentaries, and shorts portray exile and diaspora — themes associated with the Jewish experience. However, the films are most preoccupied with establishing and protecting the home.

The domestic has often been a special domain for women, so it’s no surprise that Jewishfilm.2006 highlights female filmmakers and subjects. Take Anat Zuria’s Sentenced to Marriage (2004; Brandeis, April 26, 7 pm), a documentary about the difficulty of divorce in Israel. In a land with no separation of church and state, divorce falls under the sole jurisdiction of rabbinical courts. Packed with sexist judges, the courts demand the husband’s willing consent before dissolving a marriage. Using largely hidden cameras and microphones, Zuria follows three women who have been waiting five years in legal limbo. Her immediate style declares the home as a major theater in a guerrilla cultural war.

Defending the homeland is the task charged to the subjects of You’re in the Army Now (2003, Brandeis, April 23, 4 pm, with creator and director Zippi Brand Frank in attendance). The engrossing TV series about female enlistees in the Israeli army (IDF) is the festival’s guilty pleasure. Tal and Ravit become lovers. Sivan threatens to desert and then refuses to take down a poster of an Israeli pop idol from her tent. Linor is court-martialed for kissing a man in the mess hall. Despite the cattiness and the melodrama that ensue, the context of the soldiers’ mission simmers below the surface. After the universally abstracted take on the IDF found in feature films and on the news, this show exposes the individual people and relations at work — and play — in the army.

Michael Verhoeven’s Der Unbekannte Soldat|The Unknown Soldier (2006; Brandeis, April 30, 4 pm, with Verhoeven in attendance) is not to be missed. The German filmmaker’s documentary pursues the central concern of his fiction features: the battle over the memory of World War II in contemporary Germany. Here he examines the controversy behind a recent museum exhibition about the crimes of the conscripted army on the Eastern front. German history books had selectively blamed Nazi leaders, “special task forces,” and the SS for the murder of Jews and other civilians. The exhibition provided photographic evidence of common soldiers’ involvement, revising what one historian calls the “German family album.” Interviewing scholars, soldiers, and members of a radical right-wing party protesting the exhibition, Der unbekannte Soldat is a snapshot of Germany’s identity and a lesson in how nations fashion themselves to the world. Whoever controls photographic and audiovisual memory — according to this film, and it’s borne out by the rest of this excellent festival — wins the high-stakes game of history both abroad and on the home front.