Israeli novelist and filmmaker Shemi Zarhin is ready to screen his latest film, Hemda (Bliss) at the Toronto Film Festival with virtually all the certainties of his life and work put to the test by the current war in Gaza, following the October 7, 2023 attacks on southern Israel.
“I can't explain my people. I can't explain anything,” Zarhin said. The Hollywood Reporter Tuesday on the impossibility of telling the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians in his films and in Israeli cinema in general.
Zarhin has written and filmed a book that hardly qualifies as a critique of Israel’s polarized society. Jacket before the war between Israel and Gaza broke out late last year, causing devastating destruction in the region, and is not an overtly political film, as it centers on an elderly couple, Sassi and Efi, played by Sasson Gabay and Assi Levy.
Burdened by part-time jobs, they struggle with the daily complications and worries of family, especially when two young men suddenly return into their lives and threaten their fragile marriage. Zarhin recalled being in the final stages of post-production on her film when the events of October 7 unfolded in Israel.
Suddenly, he wanted to stop working on the project. “I was so devastated by what was happening and had no interest in the film. But I couldn't disappoint the dozens of people who were working on the film. This is their livelihood, so we kept working,” he recalled.
But completing the film was complicated by scenes shot in northern Israel, where Zarhin grew up. The locations were later bombed and destroyed by Hezbollah rockets fired from southern Lebanon. “All the locations we shot in suddenly look different than they were. Most of them have been evacuated, so they look like Westerns,” he said of the Upper Galilee community where the film was shot.
And a community center with a swimming pool that was a key site in Hemda was completely destroyed. “You watch your unfinished film and reality suddenly turns it into a record for a land or territory that may never be the same again,” Zarhin said.
Despite Jacket Like pre-9/11 films that show the World Trade Center looming on the horizon, the Israeli filmmaker rejects the idea that his observational family drama imitates life to help explain the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“I don't think films should obey reality. I think our purpose, our mission, in a way, is to push the limits of reality and make the impossible possible,” Zarhin insisted as Jacket He keeps well away from the political, ethnic and religious conflicts of his country.
The reaction to Jacket among the theater audience has also changed significantly compared to the reception given to Zarhin's previous films such as Easter Fever, Aviva, my love, The world is funny AND The kind wordspresented at TIFF in 2015.
He told the first Israeli premiere of Jacket with a theater full of local residents from where the film was shot in northern Israel. “They sat there and cried, because they looked at their homes. And it was a message from a very, very ancient past that no longer exists,” Zarhin said.
Zarhin accepts that moviegoers are treating his country's films coldly, but ignorance or haste to judge frustrates him. “Choosing a part is easier than choosing a restaurant,” he noted.
Even getting Jacket at TIFF for its international premiere was a big surprise for the director and his producers, as today's major film festivals don't want the bitter political controversy of October 7 and its aftermath in Gaza to disrupt their events.
“They don't want us anymore and this (TIFF invitation) could break the curse,” Zarhin said. That's because news about TIFF's programming Jacket It was followed by unexpected interest from foreign distributors and festivals.
“Suddenly, we had a lot of buyers writing to us asking for a link to the film and even suggesting terms for a deal,” Zarhin said.
The Toronto Film Festival runs through September 15.