‘Deadly Currents’ Reaches Beyond the Stereotypes : Movies: Independent filmmaker aims to give balanced view of Israeli-Palestinian conflict in feature-length documentary.

It started with a picture clipped from the front page.

“It was some kind of wire photo that ran in a lot of newspapers around the world. And what it was was a shadow of an Israeli soldier with a rifle falling over a baby--a Palestinian baby holding a rubber ball,” explained Simcha Jacobovici.

That image eventually inspired the 39-year-old producer-director to make “Deadly Currents,” a feature-length documentary about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“The photo seized me because I thought that the whole issue had really been reduced to total caricature. It was even beyond stereotype, because what happened is the Israeli had evolved from being a human being to being a Jewish ‘RoboCop’ . . . and the Palestinian is always portrayed as either a victim or a terrorist,” he said. “That’s not what the Palestinian uprising is about--it’s not about babies throwing rubber balls.”

He pounded out a treatment for the film in a day. “I had this very visceral feeling, this desire to go into that black-and-white photo and pull out the human beings behind the stereotypes,” Jacobovici said, sitting in a booth in Canter’s, one of the few Los Angeles landmarks he is familiar with.

“Deadly Currents,” opening today at Fairfax Cinemas, begins with a grainy and distant black-and-white segment, sort of a tribute to the photo.

The issue had seemed too close to home for the Israeli-born Jacobovici, but his constant reading on the subject had also prepared him for the task. He knew the human beings he pulled out of that photo could be dangerous.

“It’s hard to keep thinking about the cinematic qualities of the film when you’re being shot at. We did that. I had a tremendous crew,” he said, most of whom came with him from Canada, where he has lived since age 9. “But we picked up people according to what they could do, and especially filming in the West Bank, you need to have Palestinians with you if you’re going to be trusted.”

The trust he established got him several “scoops”--as he calls them--including being able to film: the first interview with Rabah Jabir, an underground Palestinian leader and fugitive for more than five years; an Israeli military court; a prison on the Gaza strip, and a posse hunting down a woman suspected of collaborating with the Israelis.

But none of that prepared him for filming members of the Palestinian uprising, or intifada, interviewing a suspected “collaborator.”

“It was very important for me to get that, because Palestinians . . . have killed almost as many fellow Palestinians as the Israelis have killed--people accused of being collaborators,” he said.

The crew waited for four months to get a phone call from a source in the intifada indicating that “Operation Sunset” was under way. It finally came, the day after the Israeli secret service issued a memo indicating that members of the underground were planning to kill a film or television crew.

“We’re about to leave to go shopping. And we all sat down and looked around the room with lumps in our throat, saying, ‘Is this a coincidence?’ ” he said.

The phone rang again, this time with instructions: Bring only yourself and your cameraman--no sound operator, no translator, no Palestinian crew members.

“So, the cameraman and I went. We sat there in the West Bank in the middle of the night, and it was like something out of a movie. We flashed our lights, they flashed their lights. We were blindfolded,” he said.

Once they got to the site, Jacobovici stopped worrying about his own safety and began worrying about the alleged collaborator.

“Then I thought, what do we do if they kill this collaborator? Do we just film this? I didn’t want to make a snuff film . . . I couldn’t see myself being an accomplice to murder. On the other hand, by intervening, I’d change the reality.”

Fortunately, he said, he was never in a position where he had to make the choice between being a filmmaker and a participant in political drama.

His films, however, have already been political tools, stemming back to his earlier career as a political analyst in Toronto. His first film, “Falasha: Exile of the Black Jews,” was used by activists to get Israel to airlift Jews out of Ethiopia.

That film began as a 15-minute short. He edited it several times until it grew to 90 minutes. By the time he was done in 1982, Jacobovici realized he was an independent filmmaker.

He made two more films on Africa, “Burden on the Land” and “AIDS in Africa,” before starting “Deadly Currents” in 1990.

The film has already picked up four awards, including the best feature-length documentary from the Academy of Canadian Cinema, and it is being hailed as the most fair and balanced examination of the 4,000-year-old conflict.

“A lot of people, when you tell them you made a film on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they say, ‘Whose side is it on?’ You know, it’s not a football game. It’s not the Super Bowl. It’s not a hockey game. I didn’t want . . . people to leave the theater with that really simplistic idea,” he said.

“The trick is to try to understand something in an intelligent manner and record it honestly. And if you do that, people feel it. They feel that this is an honest analysis of the situation, and therefore it is balanced,” he said. “So I think balance is an end product, not a beginning point.”

Jacobovici didn’t want the film to be a lecture, so it has no narration, unusual for a political documentary on a complex issue. (He likened the 18 months of editing 100 hours of film to playing with a Rubik’s Cube.)

“I wanted to make a film that would resonate in Belfast or L.A.,” he said, “that would touch on universal things, like violence. Anybody who’s lived in an area where suddenly the streets belong to street gangs, I think it’ll echo to them.”

His next project is what he calls a “fake” film, a romantic thriller. He’s also working on a documentary series to be based on Neil Gabler’s book “An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood,” to be executive-produced by Los Angeles’ Propaganda Films.

“Deadly Currents” has already been screened for American policy makers and delegates to the current Middle East peace talks, and for mixed Israeli-Palestinian audiences on the West Bank.

“Do I believe this film is going to make peace in the Middle East? No,” he said, point-blank. “Do I think it’s going to resolve the problems? No. But the very fact that it’s a tool for dialogue in a situation where there’s a vacuum for dialogue . . . to me is a cause for optimism.”