Taking war personally

FOR Israeli Amos Gitai, being a citizen and a filmmaker in the Middle East means “leading a kind of schizophrenic existence. Even while you’re experiencing the event, you have to force yourself to have some perspective.”

“Here the reality grabs you, and keeps you, even if you don’t want to have a particular position on what’s happening,” Gitai said recently by phone from Haifa shortly before the cease-fire between Israel and the Hezbollah took effect and a few days after a rocket had landed half a mile from his home.

Christine Tohme -- curator of the Lebanese Assn. for Plastic Arts, Ashkal Alwan, a nonprofit arts organization in Beirut -- said she was finding the news footage from CNN, the BBC and Al Jazeera “a kind of pornography of images that is attacking our lives. The destruction and violence, the corpses. When I’m all the time confronted with these images, for me it is too much.”

So she started a project, with funding from a Dutch foundation: 10 young Lebanese artists will each make a nine-minute film over a two year period. She is hoping for “nuanced, personalized voices,” she said, cautioning: “Wars are very sexy to work on. But people need to reflect, be critical, do our homework as Lebanese, not to say Hezbollah is like this or that. Then we will have solid visual documents as reference for later on.”

Events in Lebanon are having a profound effect on filmmakers in the region on both sides of the conflict. Like other filmmakers working in both Israel and Lebanon, Gitai is not sure how this will be reflected in films in the years to come.

Today the situation is “volcanic because we don’t know what the final shape will be; we don’t know the final borders,” said Gitai, who is known for such provocative films as “Kadosh” and “Kippur.”

In Lebanon, the members of Beirut DC, a collective founded in 1999 by film professionals and arts advocates to support Arab independent cinema, “leapt immediately in the beginning of the war to deliver aid to the distressed,” said Rasha Salti, a freelance writer, blogger and film curator.

But once the government and relief organizations were involved, “people at Beirut DC stepped back and said, ‘I can document this better than I can distribute meals,’ ” said Salti.

Beirut DC produced a short film, “From Beirut ... to Those Who Love Us.” It was made at the start of the current conflict “when we were scared, when we couldn’t see the end” to the fighting, said Salti.

It opens with a woman singing a mournful song when she is interrupted by gunfire. As other faces appear on screen, a narrator talks of his country of 4 million people -- wondering if he should speak to viewers as Arabs or as Europeans -- and, fearing no one’s listening, questions whether it matters.

“From Beirut” can be viewed on BeirutLetters.org (as well as on YouTube.com); another website from Beirut, Cinemayat.org (“cinema of life” in Arabic), is expected to be up within a few days. “Filmmakers are using digital technology and the Web to produce films as a means of resistance,” said Salti, adding that her use of the term “resistance” goes beyond the traditional political meaning and suggestion of support for Hezbollah.

(On a blog, Salti identified herself as a “staunch secular democrat” who has “never endorsed Hezbollah” but does not question “their legitimacy as a political actor on the Lebanese scene.”)

More films, all shorter than 10 minutes, will appear on Cinemayat.org. In “Mariam,” Maher Abi-Samra’s camera follows a 27-year-old woman who had been displaced to Beirut and who, during a lull in aerial bombardment, returns to Siddiqine, in the south of Lebanon.

The village is quiet as she surveys the destruction; shelling is heard in the distance.

In “Daughter of Bint Jbeil,” a journalist travels to the town two miles from Israel that was considered a Hezbollah stronghold and witnesses fierce fighting. There he meets a woman who is searching for her relatives in the devastated town, and he begins to assist her.

In Israel, film crews working with Noam Shalev -- a filmmaker and producer whose company, Highlight Films, works out of Tel Aviv and the West Bank -- have been documenting life in the north. They followed families who have been displaced and are now returning. They are following a military unit stationed on the border over the next few months. One area he expects to explore is Israel’s reserve army.

“In the last 10 days, there’s been a very strong public reaction in Israel coming from the civilians who were called to the reserve army. They are coming back, and they demand answers. They’re not happy with the way the government of Israel functioned,” Shalev said in a phone interview this week.

Gitai was a soldier during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, 20 years before he began the film “Kippur,” about his experience. He started the film in the early ‘90s, when it seemed the region would have peace. Other Israeli filmmakers are working on films about the 1982 Lebanon War and the pullout of Israeli troops in 2000.

Shmoulik Maoz’s film “Lebanon” is based on his experience as an Israeli soldier in the 1982 war, “a military operation that began for three weeks and lasted 21 years. One day I was a 20-year-old kid thinking of the Tel Aviv beach and girls; the day after I find myself killing someone.” He talks at length about the experience. To say that having killed someone haunts him to this day is an understatement.

“I needed 21 years to understand that I really didn’t have a choice. I can maybe now forgive myself.”

Just as he has begun to reconcile his past, he said, “I turn on the television and I see that what happened 24 years ago is now happening again.”

Joseph Cedar’s feature “Beaufort” is set on Beaufort Mountain, in southern Lebanon, in the months before Israel pulled in May 2000. The film is near completion.

“It ends on an optimistic note,” said Cedar, who, like Maoz, lives in Tel Aviv. “The images are the same, the characters are the same, the story is the same. The way people will perceive it is different. What seemed optimistic is now ironic.”