Movie: Operation Grandma

If you’ve got an hour to kill, a decent Internet connection, and are looking for a good laugh, you could do worse than watching the Israeli comedy Mivtza Savta. When I was in Israel and mentioned I was giving a talk about kibbutz cinema, several people smiled and said, “Have you seen Operation Grandma?” Shown on Israeli TV in 1999, the movie has become a cult classic—a wicked satire about military machismo and kibbutz life. 

I thought I’d never be able to track down a copy in Canada, until I found it yesterday streaming on Google Video. The English subtitles are erratically spelled but at least they explain some of the more obscure Hebrew puns, Arabic profanity and cultural allusions.

The screwball comedy features three brothers who grew up on the fictional Kibbutz Asisim, in the Negev Desert, founded by their deceased parents: Edan, the youngest, is a nebbishy nature guide for a kids’ camp; Benny is an indebted techno-savant whose girlfriend is an aspiring judo champion; and Alon (nicknamed Krembo, because he once ate all the famous chocolate treats intended for the kibbutz’s Purim festival), is a semi-psychotic IDF commando planning a secret mission to Gaza who has moved back to the kibbutz as an “external inhabitant” and is infuriated that they won’t give him his own fridge. 

The premise: after their grandmother—who has been moved by the kibbutz into an old-age home far to the north in Netanya—dies, the three brothers need to organize a post-haste military operation to claim her body and bury it at Asisim as quickly as possible: so that Alon can fulfill his own secret mission in Gaza, Benny can install enough TV cables to earn his monthly bonus and make his next rent payment, and Edan can organize the “fire parade” with his disgruntled, switchblade-wielding campers. Think Mission: Impossible meets Weekend at Bernie’s.

Of course, their plan quickly goes off the rails and the corpse gets lost along the way (actually, it gets confiscated as a potential explosive), while other obstacles—including Dvora, the over-sexed and bureaucratic kibbutz secretary, and a techno-mad Swiss volunteer in charge of making the coffin—conspire against their attempts to give their grandma a final (and fast) send-off on the kibbutz.
The movie is quick-paced, over the top, and very, very funny. There are some in-jokes and references about kibbutz life (while never mentioned, it seems that Asisim has been privatized), but the comedy is broad and low-brow enough for almost anyone to enjoy. And I can understand now why it became such a campy cult classic of Israeli cinema.

Up, Up and Away!

One of the great scenes in the soon-to-released documentary Keeping the Kibbutz is shot from a glider, high above the Huleh Valley, in which Uzi, one of the kibbutzniks from Kfar Giladi, has taken director and cameramen Ben Crosbie for a ride. The vistas of northern Galilee are dizzying and spectacular—and were apparently quite an adventure to capture, as Crosbie describes in a stomach-trurning blog posting about the making of the documentary.

Review: The Galilee Eskimos

If newspapers write the “first draft of history”, then documentary films offer a more considered, less-hurried and yet still-relevant appraisal of the past. Added to that perspective, the creative world of fiction—whether on the page or the screen—lets readers and audiences see the great themes of modern life through an extra fish-eye lens of the imagination, in which the artist can fill in gaps in (or otherwise distort) the documentary record or use historical events as the backdrop against which invented characters spring to life. 

Most of the films about the changes to Israel’s kibbutzim (all made in the last five years) that I’ve watched, reviewed and labeled under the label of “privatization cinema” (or perhaps “cinema shinui” is more accurate) have been documentaries about real people and real places. Not so The Galilee Eskimos—and yet this fictional odyssey, released in 2006, sheds as much light as the other movies on the question of what it means to be a kibbutznik in the year 2010.

I actually watched The Galilee Eskimos last November, before it screened at the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival, but only had a chance to view it again earlier this week. I enjoyed the Israeli-made comedy-drama just as much this time as before…. which is to say, quite a bit. The story is by director-producer Jonathan Paz (whose other films include Zaya and Rakevet Ha’Emek), with a screenplay by Joshua Sobol, one of Israel’s leading playwrights and himself a former member of Kibbutz Shamir. The best way I can describe The Galilee Eskimos is “Cocoon meets The Bad News Bears, with Sten Guns.” Trust me.

The story is simple enough: one morning, a dozen elderly residents wake up to discover that the members of their deeply indebted kibbutz, founded 60 years earlier along the Lebanese border, have abandoned them in the middle of the night and run off. “They left us to die,” laments one of the retirees when they finally realize what has happened, “like the eskimos do.” The only other person is the hired Chinese care-worker, who knows something about how a society can be both communist and capitalist at the same time.

The motley crew of elderly kibbutzniks, half men, half women, are comic exaggerations of different personality types: The flighty children’s house nanny who keeps breaking into song. The feisty ex-army-type who digs up a stash of old weapons and wants to fight the War of Independence again. The lusty couple who were always too bohemian to fall into the bourgeois trap of love—until suddenly it seems too late. The senile oldster haunted by memories of his childhood and a sense of impending doom. The wheelchair-bound filmmaker whose cynicism and thoughts of suicide are balanced by his own nostalgia for the early days of kibbutz life. Together, they quarrel and joke and gossip and still—despite creaking, nearly spent bodies—lust after each other.

Finally, they must come together once more, collectively, when a nefarious developer buys the insolvent kibbutz from the bank and seeks to evict the “Galilee eskimos” so that he can build a casino-resort. There are many funny scenes, including the seniors’ desperate ploy to grow worms as a money-making enterprise, or bathing together in the nearly empty swimming pool, or trying to defend their home with weapons, as one member puts it, “nearly as old as we are”.

The movie is also, in small part, a love note to the power of film itself. A climactic moment comes when the group sits outside to watch four decades of footage shot by Yolek the kibbutz filmmaker: the erection of the first stockade, a long assembly debate about whether private tea kettles would ruin collective life, and then scenes of children playing in the kibbutz, which bring tears to all their eyes as they all weep over the loss of their own children, their own youth, and their own hard-fought-for home. It’s a powerful emotional punch in an otherwise lighthearted film.

Again, I don't dare give away the ending. The Hollywood plotline that The Galilee Eskimos mostly follows, of underdogs against bullies, usually ends in a clearcut victory for the heroes. But the gravity of changes to kibbutz life in the real world is too strong for such a predictably happy ending in this fictional version. And Jonathan Paz's film is too honest and original to let its characters—or its audience—off so easily. 

Check out the trailer below...

Review: Eight Twenty Eight

Brilliant! Brilliant! Brilliant!

These were the words that kept running through my mind as I watched Lavi Ben Gal’s delightfully eccentric, utterly original and often laugh-out-loud funny movie Eight Twenty Eight. To call it a “documentary” doesn’t do justice to Ben Gal’s creative vision, for that word suggests a straight-up journalistic-historical approach to the material, where the writer-director has produced a cinematic concoction that is far more subjective, self-conscious and deliberately elusive—part personal essay, part memoir, part commentary on the slippery art of making movie memories of the past. And it’s damn fun to watch.

I’ve yoked this film under my sub-genre of “privatization cinema”, but even here, Eight Twenty Eight defies categorization. Nitzanim, the kibbutz were Ben Gal grew up, on the coastal plain between Gaza and Tel Aviv, has undergone some form of shinui (or “change”), but we’re never told when or what. We just discover the evidence of the change as the director goes wandering around the kibbutz after years of living in Tel Aviv and only visiting infrequently; there are Thai guest workers and the dining hall is run by Russian-speaking contractors and kibbutzniks set up second-hand shops on the grounds of their home. 

Ben Gal has both a goal and a deadline in his journey home: he has received a letter from the kibbutz managers, after turning 28, that informs him that he has a year to decide whether he wants to be a member or not. The film chronicles that year, as he tries to match his memories of the past with the kibbutz he now encounters. His interior monologue, at times Woody Allen-like in its self-conscious worrying, narrates this journey, as he admits that “memory—especially my memory—shouldn’t be relied on 100%.”

His focus as a filmmaker falls not on quotes and opinions from traditional interviews but rather on obscure yet poetic details of the kibbutz that evoke memories (a patch of grass, the junk yard he once played in, the various pathways through the kibbutz, the way his father walks, a photo from 1914 of his grandmother as a young girl in Poland, the faded pattern of her playing cards) and seemingly random moments from the quiet lives of the remaining members. Nitzanim, caught in Ben Gal’s lens, feels like a ghost town at times. And yet it still comes to life for the seasonal round of collective festivals, although even here the kibbutz struggles: by the end, the members celebrate Passover as individual families, not a community, and have to rely on the Thai guest workers for entertainment at Shavuot. “The ceremonies keep happening,” Ben Gal observes, “as if without them, the kibbutz would cease to exist.”

Ben Gal is comically ambivalent about his memories of these festivals, during which the children play a prominent role in dances and songs. “As a kid, I loved and hated them,” he recalls, and then, as he films youngsters practicing the “Dance of the Four Species”, he says in a deadpan delivery: “Thanks to this dance, I discovered my allergy to figs.”

Later, he goes to the kibbutz synagogue to film elderly members preparing to mark Rosh Hashana and panics when he realizes that they’re expecting him to stay as the tenth Jewish male to make up the minyan. Even when “The Mexicans” arrive to fill the quota, Ben Gal worries it will look bad if he slips away. When he visits the kitchen where he once did a monthly shift, the hired staff who now run it invite him inside to film but then think he’s weird for shooting footage of the floors and the pots. “Do you think he speaks Russian?” one hired worker asks another about Ben Gal. (He does apparently, or at least got the sequence translated.) “I think he’s cuckoo. Tell him to leave—he’s getting in the way.” The scene is both absurdly hilarious and touching: the filmmaker, already ambivalent about whether to stay or go, is not wanted on his own kibbutz even by the hired help. At least the crusty old gatekeeper of the kibbutz, whom Ban Gal feared as a child, encourages him to remain and raise a family.

Throughout, kibbutzniks offer suggestions to Ben Gal on how to make his movie: Add this subtitle, Film me for 30 seconds, Now stop. Other people direct the film as much as he does, and the fourth wall between the filmmaker and his subjects constantly dissolves, just as the line between his memories and his present-day encounters begins to blur. The most astonishing moment comes when Ben Gal—who says he never lived in his parents' home, but always in the communal children’s houses—is told by his mother and father that, no, in fact he did live with them for at least three years while growing up. And yet he has no memory of this time.

Both the filmmaker’s journey and the movie conclude with… well, I couldn’t possibly give away the ending. I can only say that it feels perfectly suited to the unique mood and character of both this wonderfully eccentric film and its creator. Track down Eight Twenty Eight and see it if you can.

Review: Keeping the Kibbutz

The Hula Valley extends into the northernmost reaches of Israel, what’s often called the “finger of Galilee”, and borders Lebanon and the Golan Heights. It’s a stunningly beautiful landscape of rolling hills, swamps drained and tilled into lush fields and orchards, and the earliest (and best conserved) flow of the Jordan River, all shadowed by the snowy peak of Mt. Hermon. It was the picturesque backdrop to my life and work for nearly eight months on Kibbutz Shamir. The fiery, lingering sunrises and sunsets are still burned into my memory—and, for that matter, the photo at the top of my blog.

It’s also home to the kibbutzniks of Kfar Giladi, one of the first communal settlements in the area, founded in 1916. Nine decades later, Giladi voted to privatize in 2003. Since then, the landscape—on the opposite side of the valley from Shamir—has remained the same, but the life of its members has changed. Keeping the Kibbutz, a new (and as yet unreleased) documentary from two young American filmmakers, charts those changes and some of the disappointments felt by kibbutzniks left behind by privatization. Co-director Ben Crosbie was born on the kibbutz but moved to the U.S. at age three and visited occasionally growing up. In 2007, he returned to Giladi with his co-director, Tessa Moran, and let their cameras roll as kibbutzniks talked candidly about their feelings and the increasingly market-driven, individualistic management of their once-communal home.

The film (Crosbie and Moran generously sent a preview copy to me) begins with a quick introduction to the history of Giladi and the early ideals of the kibbutz movement: the philosophy of “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”; the communal child-rearing; the socializing in the dining hall; the collective harvests in the cotton fields. Flashforward to the present: the children have long since moved into their parents’ home, the dining hall is half-empty, day labourers are hired to do field work (and cotton is no longer grown), and everyone gets a different wage—just like the rest of the world.

Many of the kibbutz films I’ve watched seem to follow the famous stages of grieving: Degania (anger and bargaining); Kibbutz (depression). In Keeping the Kibbutz, we get to see kibbutzniks who have reached that fifth and final stage—who have accepted, however reluctantly, the changes that have overtaken their community but still look back with fondness and nostalgia at the unique communal society from which they all emerged.

The film does a sumptuous job of evoking that nostalgia without lapsing into sentimentality, thanks in large part to the humour and honesty that the handful of main interview subjects bring to their experiences. Throughout, the filmmakers juxtapose archival footage and photos with similar contemporary images of farm and fisheries workers, children and parents, to show that for all the changes, there is a continuity of life and community on Giladi.

During the filming, two of the older residents get told that their wages are being cut or their services are no longer needed on the kibbutz, and we see their pangs of self-doubt (or bemused resistance on the part of puckish Frankie, a former lager lout from South Africa who came to Israel to dry out and ended up marrying a kibbutznik) that accompany the loss of the identity they had formed working for their community. Giving retirement-aged members meaningful work was always a key part of the original kibbutz ideal. In fact, the optical factory where I worked at Shamir—and that has since become a multi-million-dollar international enterprise—was originally created as a make-work project for oldsters.

“I’m like excess baggage,” says Frankie when he reads the "Dear John" letter from kibbutz management. “Only you can take care of yourself and your needs,” one of the managers later tells him. He just shrugs and says, “I hate the word ‘money’.”

Uzi, another member, gets laid off from his repair job on the kibbutz—even though he is never given a chance to explain the reason the repair shop never shows a profit in its accounts is because, for decades, the kibbutz wasn’t supposed to make money and therefore fudged its accounting in various ways. “I like to do things for people,” he admits. “This is my god. I don’t need religion.”

In a later scene, Uzi takes one of the filmmakers for a glider ride high above the Hula Valley and viewers get a panoramic sense of why the kibbutz members are so deeply attached to this landscape, so reluctant to leave, even as their community changes from its original ideals. The film is filled with beautiful images of the kibbutz and its hilly environs, evocatively backed by a gorgeous piano and guitar score by composer Preston Hart.

“I love the kibbutz,” says Uzi’s wife, Kathy, who arrived as a volunteer in 1968 and married into Giladi. “It breaks my heart that it has to change. I’m sad that my children grew up in a special society that doesn’t exists anymore.”

But she says these words with a smile on her lips, and not a bitter one. She seems to have accepted the changes, adapted to them even (she "buys" and then runs the kibbutz store), and the film ends with a scene of a backyard barbecue in the last light of dusk, with friends and laughter and a sense of community that has altered perhaps but hasn’t fully disappeared. The old socialist principles have been shed, but the members are still “keeping the kibbutz”.

Check out this trailer for the documentary and watch out for the film at festivals in the coming year…

KEEPING THE KIBBUTZ: Trailer from Eidolon Films on Vimeo.

Review: Kibbutz

When my DVD copy of the documentary Kibbutz arrived in the mail late last year, I was so busy that I didn’t have time to put it into a player for a couple of weeks. When I did, I was disappointed that it had gotten damaged during its journey from Israel to the West Coast of B.C. The film's producer quickly mailed a new copy. This time, I immediately popped it into my computer at work to make sure it functioned, so I’d be ready to view it when I had more free time. An hour later, I had watched the film in its entirety—and become so engrossed in the account of the slow, sad unravelling of Kibbutz Hulata that I nearly forgot to pick up my daughter at daycare!

Kibbutz, released in 2005, is one of the first examples of what I call “privatization cinema”—that’s why it gets to claim the simple name of its title. Interestingly, while other films chronicle the debate around and prelude to the vote to privatize on different kibbutzim, Racheli Schwartz's documentary tracks instead the stages of grieving and disillusionment that follow Hulata’s decision to reduce its communal commitment to its members. What makes Kibbutz so affecting is the personal intimacy and extended context that Schwartz brings to the material. In fact, it was originally subtitled “A Personal Diary.”

A member for 30 years, the filmmaker isn’t just a visitor offering a snapshot by an outsider of her kibbutz. Instead, her film follows various members (including her  own family) over the course of five years—three older women, from the founding generation, become symbols of the kibbutz’s lost ideas and abandoned history, as they die off, one by one. Schwartz, who asks people questions from behind her lens, admits early on that “making the movie helped me to decide to stay.”

It can’t have been an easy decision. Her film opens memorably with the story of a laid-off citrus worker, a member of the kibbutz, who hanged himself from a tree overlooking the orchards where he once worked. These same orchards are later sawed down for being unprofitable. Schwartz captures remarkably revealing footage of a privatization consultant, hired by the kibbutz, going through a list of enterprises and expenses and telling kibbutz managers how many employees to lay off and which operations to shut down. “The kibbutz was the main way to make settlement possible,” the financial advisor tells Schwartz later. “At some point, it was finished.”

The filmmaker has an ear for such memorable quotes. “We are going through a process of breakdown,” says one member. “They stole the kibbutz from me,” announces another. One kibbutznik wonders if the fact that Hulata—located south of Shamir and named after the Hula Valley—was built on the absorption of underprivileged reason was partly why it has failed to thrive in the hyper-capitalist 21st-century. “Since the changes on the kibbutz,” he laments, “people only talk about money.”

Schwartz also has a keen eye for images that carry symbolic weight. When managers decide to first privatize and then shut down the communal dining room, her camera lingers on the skinny cats looking vainly for scraps and then fixes on the stopped clock in the empty hall. She reveals how the simple act of growing shrubs becomes for many members a defiant act of walling themselves away from their neighbours. She interviews an employee of the kibbutz laundry, his salary slashed because his labour is now deemed menial, who has turned to religion because he feels his kibbutz has turned its back on his own family, and yet he still saves the loose shekels he finds in his machines and gives them to families more needy than his own. (His own son, affected by the changes, also tries to commit suicide.) She observes a music teacher packing her car full of wind and string instruments and driving off, before narrating: “A kibbutz that has reached the point that it has to sell its musical instruments has lost its way.”

It’s a powerful, damning sentiment in a beautifully wrought documentary that offers a deeply personal yet rigorously researched perspective on the privatization debate. I don’t know if you can generalize from the experiences of Hulata to all kibbutzim, but those communities still considering the prospects of privatization would be wise to watch this movie and learn from the mistakes documented so powerfully in its images. For anyone curious about the film, check out the trailer below...

Review: Degania: The First Kibbutz Fights its Last Battle

 Degania: The First Kibbutz Fights its Last Battle is a documentary with a definite point of view—the film’s bittersweet subtitle should make that clear—like a Michael Moore film without the presence of the lumbering U.S. agent provocateur. It is also a fascinating account of a watershed moment in the 100-year history of the kibbutz movement: the decision by members of Kibbtuz Degania A, the original communal settlement in Israel, to privatize their community in 2007. This news broke internationally, as the world finally took notice of the changes that had been transforming kibbutzim over the previous 20 years. It also became used — by free-market bloggers around the Internet — as the final nail in the rhetorical coffin of socialism.

Yitzhak Rubin’s 56-minute account of the last days of Degania as a fully communal kibbutz begins, curiously, with scenes of American Christians getting baptized along the banks of the Jordan River, not far from where Kibbutz Degania Aleph was founded. The movie then outlines the founding myth and storied history of this influential community (including its vital and valiant role in the War of 1948) through interviews and archival footage. But it soon makes clear that changes are afoot. Despite nearly a hundred years of “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” (and relative wealth compared to other kibbutzim), some members and leaders at Degania have been lobbying to alter the fundamental egalitarian structure of their community.

Here, the movie excels at letting viewers play fly-on-the-wall to the heated debates and civil strife caused by the public (and private) debate that precedes the vote to privatize—how it sets brother against brother, friend against friend, neighbour against neighbour. As one anti-privatization member asks, Why do members who want to privatize need to irrevocably change what is unique about Degania, when anyone who wants to live in a private neighbourhood can simply walk out the gates and find a “normal” community like that anywhere in Israel or the world.

Despite the radical origins of Degania, in 2007 its more bourgeois trappings are what make people want to stay: its slowed-down rural life, its sense of family, safety and security, where kids can run free and parents know that someone will bring their children home, amidst a world (and a country) of potential danger and uncertainty. It’s pretty clear that the filmmaker sides with the traditionalists of Degania, but we still get to see the arguments of the other side, led by kibbutz director Shai Shoshany (who I interviewed last year). Even for longtime residents, like Yoya and Alan Shapiro (a daughter of a Degania founder and her American-born husband), the choice is tough: they know that many of the younger members want change or they might leave.

Finally, the filmmaker takes us right into the final pre-vote general assembly before balloting on the proposed initiatives. Shoshany asks Rubin, the director, to wait outside and not film the proceedings, but the canny filmmaker keeps his camera rolling and captures memorable footage of the turbulent back and forth of this all-important historic debate. This is how a dream ends: democratically and divided. (That said, in Degania and other kibbutzim, a vote to change the economic structure of the community requires a super-majority, usually 75 to 80%, rather than 50% plus one.)

In the end, the anti-privatization members lose the vote and must accept the will of their peers. In 2007, Degania introduced differential salaries and other free-market initiatives to their once communal economic structure. When I visited last year, I only had a chance to interview Shai Shoshany, the kibbutz director, so I got little personal sense of how the privatization plans have panned out for the other kibbutzniks. That said, I did come across this interesting news video, shot a year after the vote, which suggests that the Shapiros, originally resistant to the changes, have seen benefits to their community—or at least accepted the inevitability of change.

In any case, this film is a vital document both as a historical record of the first and best-known kibbutz and as an incisive sociological unpacking of how privatization occurs in such democratic communities. It’s well worth watching as Degania marks 100 years since its founding with a year of celebrations and a huge three-day ceremony in early October, when Israeli president Shimon Peres and members of cabinet will visit Degania and help to honour the occasion.

Degania can be purchased or watched as pay-per-view online here. As I was looking for links, I also came across this fascinating footage from 1937 of Degania from the Spielberg Jewish Film Archive. The narration is perhaps typical of its time—a bit over the top—but it makes for fascinating viewing on the centenary of the first kibbutz. Whether it has fought its last battle, I leave up to others to debate...