Send in the Clowns . . . Carefully

Any Israeli filmmaker knows to stay clear of the Palestinian issue. With suicide bombers and violent clashes making headlines on the news day after bloody day, the last thing the Israeli public wants to see is a film about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, let alone its most violent chapter, the long intifada.

Yet scriptwriter and director Eyal Halfon delivered just that, and made a comedy of it no less--one that pitches the tattered tent of a shrinking Russian circus smack in the middle of the West Bank during the intifada, the Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Halfon is counting on a charismatic lion on the lam, brassy circus music and slapstick comedy to draw Israeli audiences.

“I wanted to make a film about the intifada,” said Halfon, though he admits, “I also wouldn’t want to see such a film.”

So he set out to tell the story in a refreshing way.

Mixing political commentary with magic realism and spoofs, “Circus Palestina” is the product of Halfon’s vision. The film opens the Israel Film Festival in Los Angeles on Thursday.

At his producers’ behest, the word “intifada” is never spoken in the movie. Posters for the film in Israel shout “Circus,” while the small type of the word “Palestina” (Hebrew for “Palestine”) fades into the white and blue stripes of the big-top background.

A Real-Life Filmmaker in an Escapist World

A former journalist and part-time documentary maker in his mid-40s, Halfon drew his inspiration from social and political reality. In this, he goes against the grain of Israeli cinema of the 1990s. Apolitical personal movies became the norm following the 1993 Oslo peace accord with the Palestinians, when Israelis hoped their nation’s existential problems were over. A surge in wealth and consumer spending, along with the Americanization of Israeli culture, bolstered the younger generation’s escapist tendencies.

Halfon calls these movies “Sheinkin Street stories,” after the street here that caters to hedonistic, fashionable young Israelis who turn their backs to the conflicts rocking the country. “The films are more related to MTV culture than to Middle Eastern culture,” he said.

Halfon’s first feature, “Cup Final” (1991), set during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon a decade earlier, was released as intifada violence peaked and people were becoming sick of politics. Although it was acclaimed abroad, it did poorly in Israel.

Halfon said he learned his lesson: “I have taken steps in my creative development to try to escape reality a bit more.”

He used an incident he read about 20 years ago when he was working as a ranger for the Natural Reserves Authority--the discovery of mysterious lion footprints near Jerusalem--as the basis for his circus saga.

But in the making of “Circus Palestina,” reality proved hard to dodge. When Halfon and his crew thought they had found the perfect West Bank location for their film--a beautiful village, accessible from a road barred by a single military checkpoint--Palestinian terrorists ambushed a car driving through the area at night, killing an Israeli and injuring her boyfriend. Ten days before filming was to begin, Halfon had to fall back on a safer Arab village in Israel.

Convincing Arab actors to lend themselves to Halfon’s circus fantasy was no easy matter either. Basaam Zuamot, a popular actor from the West Bank, accepted the lead Arab role of circus entrepreneur and high-profile crook in a heartbeat. But Arabs who live in Israel were outraged by the script.

Set Was a Microcosm of Society’s Concerns

How dare someone bring a circus to Israeli-occupied territories during such troubled times? they asked. (In fact, an ailing circus from Eastern Europe did tour the West Bank during the intifada. Halfon found the remaining circus tent and its bankrupt entrepreneur hiding from tax collectors north of Tel Aviv.)

Rauda Suleiman, an actress from a strict Muslim family, said she could not kiss Zuamot, her husband in the story, before the cameras. Halfon insisted the scene was key to a lovemaking sequence that culminates with moans of orgasmic pleasure rising--in unison, at last--from an Arab village in the valley and an Israeli settlement on a hill.

Rather than face dishonor, Suleiman resigned. Halfon cajoled her into rejoining the cast by bringing in a look-alike for the most risque bit. But after performing some of the mandatory kissing, Suleiman cried for an hour and was almost banished from her home.

“Although her husband is a successful singer and she’s a liberated, educated woman, we still belong to two different cultures,” Halfon said.

Recent history was helpful when it came to putting together a Russian circus from scratch. There is an abundance of artists who immigrated from the collapsed Soviet Union to Israel. The film’s circus musicians were lifted right off the streets. Flamboyant Mariana, the lion tamer, is played by Evgenia Dudina, an actress from Gesher, the renowned Russian-Israeli theater company.

The only truly professional movie actor, and by far the most expensive one on the set, was the lion. Said to be a descendant of the MGM icon, it was flown in from Hollywood.

Between rewrites, Halfon significantly toned down the political charge of his script, trading a scene of final carnage for a happy ending. But even so, “Circus Palestina” contains images too powerful for some Israelis.

Kids raising provocative Palestinian flags that Israeli soldiers then dutifully tear down and burn is a scene that recurs in the movie--as it did almost daily during the intifada--like a favorite clown act. At one point, the portly Palestinian played by Zuamot is ordered by Israeli soldiers, in front of his wife and son, to climb a ladder and take down a flag flying from a post, risking electrocution.

Mariana, the Russian lion tamer, asks a sympathetic Israeli soldier standing by: “What’s wrong with the flag?”

“It’s just too high,” he answers. “It’s too white. There are too many colors. It’s too much of a flag.”

“People died because of this game,” said Halfon, who witnessed the intifada up close as a soldier on reserve duty. “And what was this crazy game about? Now you can see the flag everywhere.”

The ladder scene almost ended on the cutting room floor.

“Much more terrible things than this happened at the time in the West Bank and on our streets,” Halfon said, “but still, people said the scene was very difficult to watch. When you see it on the news it’s OK, but something different happens on a movie screen. It’s part of the magic of cinema.”

Could the Israeli public have come full circle since the late ‘80s and be ready to see political movies again? There are some positive signs. “Circus Palestina,” funded mostly by the state Fund for the Promotion of Israeli Quality Films, won this year’s Israeli equivalent of the Oscar for best film, script, actor, supporting actor and musical score.

Halfon believes that the current progress in the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians will help at the box office. But he notes that attendance could be jeopardized at any moment by a dramatic event like a car bombing “no matter how well we hide the word ‘Palestine.’ ”