Day Seven - Thursday, August 30

Les Intestins de la terre (The Intestines of the Earth). Director: Olivier Barbier.. France (2006) 13 min, French with English subtitles.
Macrophotography is used to explore the earthworm’s vital part in the cycle of soil regeneration. A rather slimy and er..tasty film – since an earthworm’s defecation is shown several times. Not for the sensitive stomach, particularly just after a meal. Interestingly, soil over-use has resulted in a reduction of the number of earthworms, from 250 per cubic meter of soil, down to 50. Floods in Europe have been attributed to fields that no longer are as porous with the lack of earthworms – one worm tunnels about 15 or 17 lengths in a day. And vineyards use copper, a metal additive that is toxic to earthworms. Now you know.

Technical note: sadly, this year, the Festival seems to have decided that for non-HD video productions, the video projector is set to “stretch” mode for films with a 4:3 ratio (traditional TV format). This results in really bad distortion in the left and right thirds of the screen…it’s as if you’re watching the film through a prism when there’s a pan, or an object moves from one side to the other. It can be vertigo inducing at times...

Mein Führer – Die Wirklich Wahrste Wahrheit Über Adolf Hitler (My Führer – The Truly Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler). Director: Dani Levy. Germany (2007) 95 min, German with English subtitles.
www.imdb.com/title/tt0780568/
Jonathan wanted to see this satire, and initially I didn’t, but eventually went along. I didn’t have to walk out (something I promised if I found the Holocaust diminished in any way). Well, I didn’t have to worry. Other reviewers have already talked about how this is sort of first for German cinema, where sensitivity about the Holocaust and a fear of still being taken for Nazis, has so far kept German directors from treating the Holocaust as satire or comedy (think of Life is Beautiful). Dani Levy, purportedly himself from a Jewish (Swiss) family, weaves a fantastic, improbable tale of a Jewish actor who had helped Hilter in the 1930’s with his speeches, who has now been forcefully relocated to a concentration camp. He's brought back to try to help Hitler regain his confidence for a big speech in the last days of the European war. Levy sets up several hilarious scenarios between Professor Adolf Israel Grünbaum and Hitler, and Hitler with Eva Braun, but downplay the Nazi’s Final Solution, whatever Hitler might be doing with “this filthy Jew”. However, the incredulous “Sorry about the Final Solution, Grünbaum, don’t take it personally…” is funny once, but seems to be an apology for the satire after a few times. There’s a bit of a whiff of the TV series Hogan’s Heroes, but much darker, and without the happy endings.

Finemachiya Moché (Where Are You Going Moshe?). Director: Hassan Benjelloun.
Morocco—Canada (2007) 90 min, Arabic with English subtitles.
A nice little story that purports to be an example of the Jewish (Sephardic) exodus from Morocco to Israel, France, and Canada in the early 1960’s. The best propoganda films tell a compelling story and slide in the message in a palatable form.

Mustapha, the manager (and soon to be owner) of the only bar in the town of Bejjad, has a problem. Most of the Jews are leaving, with Morocco’s independence and recent death of their King, "who was a protector of Jews". The town council, under the urging of the local Imam, will have the bar closed unless one non-Muslim remains in town, since the bar license is conditional on this point. Never mind that many local Muslims frequent the bar, and could care less what the Imam wants. Mustapha concocts a plan (at the suggestion of his son Hassan) to convince Shlomo, the local musician, to stay.

Without talking to some of my Sephardic connections about their families' emigration, I can’t say how accurate is he portrait of Jews being fully part of the community, not only being tolerated, but accepted, since I'm not Sephardic. But it seems to fly in the face with why the majority of Moroccan Jews left, with only 3000 left there today. The film’s reality is that Bejjad was a Moroccan “Mayberry” village, with everyone (well, almost everyone) having no bad feelings about the Jews. Mustapha’s son is even dating Shlomo’s daughter (although on the sly, since it wouldn’t really be accepted). So while the “portrait” of life there seems all happy, it seems the reasons for the majority of Jews leaving is placed on their unease about the political situation, counsel from their rabbi about returning to their biblical "home", and external pressure from “Zionists” to emigrate to Israel. Many of them don't want to go, since it means leaving their Muslim friends.

This seems to go against the prevailing evidence, which is Jews were leaving because of increasing and often government sanctioned discrimination, which rose significantly after the formation of Israel in 1948. This “it’s the Zionists fault” subtext is carried off mostly with subtlety, but some stand out as obvious editorializing, such as when some of the town businessmen talking about the exodus say Israel is facilitating emigration of Moroccan Jews to help “fill the country”. This is placed in the context of gossip, with more and more outlandish statements, like “…the Europeans are trading Jews like money”. These statements are shown to be a minority view, as is the feeling on the part of one of the Muslim Moroccan town councilmen that the Jews “. . .aren’t really Moroccan, so if they go, we’ll have more jobs for Moroccans.”

So the Moroccan Jews are shown making a perilous journey to Israel. Through Shlomo’s daughter’s letters, we learn that “…it’s always too hot, I’m always looking for shade. We prefer to speak in Arabic, but we have to learn Hebrew. We don’t get hired in Israel unless there’s no Ashkenazi (European) Jews available” [although this discrimination was and still is to some extent true]. Israel is said to be “a trap”, most of the Moroccans would prefer to go on to France and also Canada – Moshe’s daughter ultimately marries David, one of the emigration “facilitators” that accompanied her group of émigrés, and then they in turn emigrate to Marseilles. Hassan ultimately tells this information, hidden from Shlomo by Mustapha, since he fears Shlomo leaving. Hassan could care less, since Rachel is lost to him now.

Even the “happy ending”, where Shlomo eventually leaves for Marseilles to live with his family, seems to have a subtext. In Casablanca, he runs across the village idiot Berbeq’ha being taunted by kids in the streets and beaten. He wasn’t able to emigrate on to Israel with the others, and was despondent that that he wouldn’t be allowed to go fight in the Army and that “they’d lose the war” without him. The film’s closing scene is in Mustapha’s bar in Bejjad, with the required one Jew to keep the bar open, the happy “General” Berbeq’ha, in a fake uniform, seated in the bar, with an eye patch over his now blind left eye. A subtle parody of the late Moshe Dayan, perhaps? However, in the film’s reality, he’s happy, the remaining (Muslim) patrons of the bar and its owner are all happy, despite the best attempts by the pleasure-denying Imam.

The political rhetoric at the very end of the film then nicely outs the apparent agenda behind it. In mentioning about Israel’s 2006 incursion into Lebanon, where “some of the attackers where originally from Morocco, the film asks ‘what would have happened if the Arab world hadn’t let go of its children? How might have things gone then?’” If it weren't for this rather blatant editorializing, one might have discounted all of the other signs as just as part of the narrative, but it contextualizes everything before.

My guess is the film’s final political statement represents a form of the more benign pan-Arabic feeling about Jews that one can find today, which is that as long as Jews were a powerless minority within Arab culture, with no ambitions towards statehood, there was no quarrel, and they were a (mostly integrated) part of the Arabic world. This sort of echoes the less virulent anti-Israel sentiments which typically go along the lines of “A united Palestine, with Arabs naturally as a majority, with Jews as a protected minority within it, would be perfectly acceptable to the Arab world.”