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<\/a>Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor\u2019s \u201cNAZA.\u201d Photo courtesy of NYFF.<\/p>\n\u201cNAZA\u201d is a totally devastating documentary, made by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, the same Israelis who made the powerful \u201cNo Other Land\u201d with Palestinian Basel Adra. That film gave us front-row seats to watch Israeli West Bank settlers brutally assault Palestinians, raze their houses and schools, and, after these were rebuilt, come back and raze them again. In this new film, we are witnesses to even more appalling realities, as narrated by some 24 Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers\u2014seen only in dark silhouette profile and speaking with disguised voices\u2014about what they did and what they saw as they served in Gaza. In Israel, the truth of these reports has been ferociously questioned because of the anonymity of the sources. But apart from every indication of meticulous journalism, given the rage with which this film has been received there, it is perfectly clear it couldn\u2019t have been made in any other way. Filmed in black and white, the documentary shows Abraham sitting on a nighttime rooftop in Tel Aviv, where the intelligence services are based, asking quiet questions. At first the answers are dry numbers and procedures: how to assess a building to be destroyed, how to track down Hamas members, how phone surveillance works. Then comes a story of AI picking up a child speaking of Daddy, and both Daddy and child being killed. But, of course, mistakes are made, and sometime only the family is killed, with Daddy not at home after all. Worse, there are deliberate killings of children, of people known to be ordinary Gazans, of people racing just to get food. Like a video game, one says, all remote. And from another: The intelligence agents were no Arab haters, they were from Tel Aviv, the elite. Abraham says he chose to film at night because people will say things in the dark that they might not be willing to admit in daylight. One officer says it was fun, not a single voice raised to express doubt while they were in action, completing the \u201cmission.\u201d To one who admitted feeling disturbed, Abraham asks, \u201cWhy didn\u2019t you say something?\u201d \u201cBecause it wasn\u2019t my role, I was technical.\u201d The Nazi parallels are overwhelming, and I say this as a Jewish person for whom Israel was an important and special place for most of my life. It is bewildering in fact\u2014how in the world could Jews of all people be doing this to others? Of course, if you have lived your whole life with everyone around you wanting to kill you, what does that do to your own humanity? The incident on the Dubai plane filled with Israelis, in which the pilot attempted to crash it, throwing the passengers back into the vulnerability and horror of October 7 and leaving them not knowing whom to trust, reminds one of why, apart from Netanyahu\u2019s toxicity, Israelis went along with the Gaza bombings and chose not to look. But this film\u2019s Israeli director chooses not to go into causes or feelings of guilt\u2014he wants to keep his focus on what was done to the Palestinians. Gaza is full of bodies, one tells us. The film periodically cuts away from these terrible exchanges to view Tel Aviv apartment buildings, looking into windows where Israelis go about their daily lives, not far from Gaza. Interestingly, Jonathan Glazer, the British director of \u201cThe Zone of Interest,\u201d is an executive producer of this film, and we remember the pleasant domestic life he imagines for the family of a major Nazi commandant, living in a house right next to Auschwitz. Israel has banned \u201cNAZA\u201d (to be fair, just as French TV banned Marcel Ophuls\u2019 \u201cThe Sorrow and the Pity\u201d as late as 1969, and as Poland objected to Claude Lanzmann\u2019s \u201cShoah,\u201d because both Holocaust documentaries told truths about ugly capitulations that neither country wanted known). So, Netanyahu and others have threatened the masterful and courageous creators of \u201cNAZA\u201d (and their families!) with severe punishments, and it is even more deeply disturbing that the whole country seems hostile to these two brave truthtellers. For good reason. It is hard to see how Israel can hold its head up after the clearly factual horrific revelations in this extraordinary and painful film. And the fact that they are not alone in this sad world for such behavior doesn\u2019t help.<\/p>\n
Just as \u201cNAZA\u201d deals with material that is painful for Israelis to face, \u201cA Man of His Time\u201d looks at a period of French history that France is deeply uncomfortable examining. The Nazis invaded in 1940 and France fell quickly, with the Nazis taking full control of the north and a Vichy government set up in the south under the appearance of French control. That government was profoundly collaborationist, gradually as terrible in its actions as the Nazis, and eventually fully taken over by them. And perhaps it is because France is currently threatened by an increasingly powerful right that this period seemed important to recall just now. Director Emmanuel Marre has constructed the film around his grandfather, Henri Marre, who played an ignominious role in the Vichy government. Eager for a position of importance but instead becoming a bureaucratic functionary, Henri slowly transforms, as we watch, into someone who calculates\u00a0the numbers of Jews to be deported just as he figures out how much fuel to allot and decides which terminology best disguises the reality of what he is doing. Another figure directly above him, Henri Maux, is an example of someone who resists, slow walks his responses, as Henri Marre\u2014though often looking uncomfortable in the face of the worst things said or requested\u2014complies. A lovely, poetic voiceover of love letters runs through the film, read as the correspondence between Henri (Swann Arlaud, in a beautiful performance) and his wife Paulette (Sandrine Blancke), which Marre says comes from their actual letters. When she finally joins him and understands how he has evolved, a whole new interesting layer of complexity is achieved. The \u201clittle lady\u201d turns out to be charismatic, as we see in one scene, and she ends up morally appalled by him. It is a quiet, very skillfully made film, though not an easy one to follow because it is both dense and low-key, almost casual, in its descent into a moral abyss. But the unusual angle is what makes it particularly interesting.<\/p>\n In keeping with these visions of a world on fire, and of those who comply with evil (government) forces and those who fight them, a special mention must be made of Julia Loktev\u2019s 12-hour documentary \u201cMy Undesirable Friends,\u201d which follows dissident journalists in Russia and, in Part 2, shows how they were forced into exile. I missed Part 1, \u201cLast Air in Moscow,\u201d but I must say Part 2, \u201cExile,\u201d in this festival, often had me in tears. Right after Putin invades Ukraine to the horror of these journalists, he declares all-out war on the media. Newspapers and TV shows felt compelled to close down, and journalists who told the truth were labeled \u201cforeign agents\u201d and faced 15 years in prison. So, the film\u2014shot on an iPhone, yet wonderfully made\u2014follows a group who worked for TV Rain, the last independent station, as they, with great reluctance, leave their homeland for various places: Istanbul, Tbilisi, Tel Aviv, Prague, Vienna, Amsterdam, and eventually a number in the U.S. The filming is intimate, and almost entirely with women. The first two journalists we follow go to Turkey, the only place that would take them without a visa. Lera, the youngest at TV Rain, is especially consumed with grief, feeling lost without work, cut off from family, wandering from country to country and not knowing where she will be tomorrow, worrying about money, getting ripped off by a cab driver, in a struggle over how many people can sleep in the room they rented. Fiercely opposed to the Ukraine war, they cannot understand their parents\u2019 support of it. We move on to another woman, Anya Nemser, somewhat older and a major journalist (also co-director of this film), with a little family. She is granted a passport to Israel but is appalled that, given all her moral values, she is willing to take it. She worries about how her teenage daughter is processing all this, is determined to leave Tel Aviv, and ends up in Tbilisi despite information on the exiles\u2019 grapevine that Georgia made some kind of deal with Russia to keep people\u2014especially those who worked for TV Rain\u2014out. She is full of pain\u2014radiating this wave of madness that, she says, her young daughter must intuit\u2014but she keeps reminding herself that she has it a lot better than those who are being bombed. And when she gets to Tbilisi with her husband and child, after multiple \u201cno\u201d answers to her apartment inquiries, someone recognizes her name from TV Rain and says it would be an honor to rent to her. They all struggle to keep reporting on Russia\u2019s war against Ukraine, from wherever they land, but at great cost to themselves. One young woman decides to go to Ukraine itself to report what she sees, shockingly seeking out the frontlines, and writes so detailed a description of dead bodies that that alone moves you to tears. There are joyful reunions of friends and colleagues. These are incredibly brave and wonderful people\u2014heroic, warm, funny, and loving (and physically beautiful), clearly all major journalists. Following Putin for so many years, one could wonder what happened to the Russia of the great literature one loved, but looking at these young people, one can see it is still very much alive, though tragically embattled. And of course the details of their struggles now feel all too familiar to us here, with Trump \u201cbanning\u201d CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House. In the film, Putin\u2019s talk and his actions sound chillingly like Trump\u2019s playbook. The film is a warning to us.<\/p>\n \u201cFjord\u201d raises other kinds of moral questions. A Romanian family has come to live in a part of Norway with stunning fjords, at first warmly welcomed and then met with awful bureaucratic censure for behavior not unusual for a Romanian religious family but alien and punishable in the eyes of Norwegian social services. That this tension occurs in a part of the world renowned for its tolerance and humane values is what gives the film its interest. Romanian director Christian Mungiu\u2019s films can be masterly, like \u201c4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days\u201d and \u201cGraduation,\u201d but \u201cFjord\u201d is, in my view, not one of his best. It goes on longer than it needs to. And with its central idea, it is somewhat predetermined and the characters feel schematic, not quite coming alive. Still, the pressures exerted by the mainstream culture, especially since it sees itself as so well-meaning, are disturbing. It is a film worth seeing.<\/p>\n<\/a>Emmanuel Marre\u2019s \u201cA Man of His Time.\u201d Photo courtesy of NYFF.<\/p>\n<\/a>Julia Loktev\u2019s \u201cMy Undesirable Friends.\u201d Photo courtesy of NYFF.<\/p>\n<\/a>Christian Mungiu\u2019s \u201cFjord.\u201d Photo courtesy of NYFF.<\/p>\n