For My Father

Directed by Dror Zahavi
Israfilm/Relevant F!lm



Centering on the chaste love affair between a Palestinian and an Israeli, For My Father offers the viewer a Middle Eastern re-telling of Romeo and Juliet while trying to spell out the complexities of post-intifada Israel.

The film opens up on Tarek (Shredi Jabarin), a Palestinian who has decided to act as suicide bomber. He’s ambivalent about the state of Israel—as well as Palestinian resistance to it—but takes action in order to salvage his yet-unseen father’s sullied reputation. After unsuccessfully trying to set off his bomb, he realizes that the device fails due to faulty wiring in the detonator, a jerry-rigged switch. Panicking, he flees, ending up in one of the scruffier areas of Tel Aviv. He ducks into an electronic repair shop, encountering Katz (Schlomo Vishinsky), an elderly Romanian Jew with a chip on his shoulder and a leaky roof. Tarek agrees to fix the hole in Katz’s roof in exchange for a new switch, which has to be ordered. As Shabbat is celebrated the next day, Katz’s shop will be closed until Sunday. Tarek is then forced to spend the weekend with the very people he was planning to kill.

During his sojourn, he interrupts the half-hearted suicide attempt of Mrs. Katz. He also befriends Keren (Hili Yalon), a beautiful tough-cookie who has fled her Orthodox Jewish community after an out-of-wedlock pregnancy. After saving her from a group of Orthodox toughs who object to her independent living and emo clothing, the two spend most of the following two days together, enjoying an easy rapport. Tarek rediscovers a passion for life which deepens his ambivalence about his mission. The fact that his handlers can detonate the bomb with a cell phone—and have threatened to harm his parents—only intensifies Tarek’s dilemma.

Yes, the movie did have its manipulative moments and the director unquestionably downplays the hostilities between Arabs and Jews in Israel. (The “Death to Arabs” graffiti scribbled on a building seemed downright contrived.) I found it odd that the Israeli characters never once questioned the very noticeable lump under Tarek’s clothes. For that matter, Keren and the Katzes seem too accepting of Tarek’s explanation for his very presence in Tel Aviv, a city that has kept Palestinians out via roadblocks for years. I also found myself questioning whether Israelis as a group are as averse to racial profiling as the Katzes and Keren are, and if the decision to paint Shaul, the one Jew who does express suspicion of Tarek, as a pompous buffoon wasn’t a subtle form of self-congratulation on the part of the Israeli director and screenwriters. I couldn’t help but wonder about how a Palestinian filmmaker would have approached this tale—or if a Palestinian would have chosen to tell this particular story at all.

In all fairness, however, this film wasn’t about the politics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This film is basically a movie about outcasts and how they often instinctively seek out and cling to other outcasts, battling loneliness while skirting the edges of society. For My Father also touches on the very human need to maintain reputation with the emotionally fraught bond between parents and children driving the story in surprising ways. I appreciated the fact that the story doesn’t insult the audience with a tacked-on happy-ending; there’s no way that a movie with a terrorist as leading man can end on an emotional high note.

Despite its over-idealized view of ethnic strife and pseudo-philosophical leanings, I am going to recommend For My Father on the strengths of its understated and powerful performances. But anyone expecting to get a crash course on the current state of Israeli-Palestinian resentments needs to look elsewhere.

Review by Ebony Edwards-Ellis

The Woodmans

Directed by C. Scott Willis
C. Scott Films



The prize-winning documentary The Woodmans chronicles the histories of a family of artists through conversations, monologues, journals, and both fine art photographs and family snapshots. The film’s narrative, from its start with the marriage of George and Betty Woodman to its finish with their lives today, is marked by their daughter, photographer Francesca Woodman, whose reputation has skyrocketed in the decades after her suicide in 1981 at twenty-three years of age.

After the Tribeca Film Festival screening, director C. Scott Willis, unfamiliar with the art world before the project, told how he met the Woodmans socially. They told him they were the parents of the famous photographer, and Willis made the embarrassing error of asking if their daughter would mind talking to his daughter, who was studying photography. Out of that situation and the Woodmans’ account of what had happened, Willis was inspired to make The Woodmans.

“Why did Francesca jump off a building?” while never voiced, and positioned as one question among many, is addressed in the pained, incomplete way suicide is usually discussed. There is no “interviewer” or even unifying message or theme, just unobtrusive aesthetic shaping of the movement forward of lives.

Francesca’s precocity—many of her photographs were made in her teens—is attributed in the film to her immersion in art as she was growing up. However, the film underplays the centrality of sexuality to her and most women’s lives (Francesca experienced a romantic break-up before her death) and ignores the sexual politics of the declining women’s movement, which coincided with Francesca’s adolescence.

Since both George and Betty have been artists all their lives, there is necessarily much about their making of art. The parental Woodmans speak loftily of exhibiting to a wider public, but there’s material here for an indictment of the art world: the winner-take-all reward system, the commodification of artistic product (Francesca’s photographs financed tuition for a collector’s children), and the competition among artist friends and, yes, family. Yet, the background of well-appointed studios and a house with a pool in Italy could fuel enough lifestyle lust to gentrify numerous bohemias.

Francesca, who with little success tried commercial fashion photography and worked as a photographic assistant, does “talk” about money through a chorus of friends and her fashion photographs. Indeed, her parents bicker about whether being rejected for a National Endowment of the Arts grant contributed to her suicide. (George does mention that his father “helped the couple financially” but disapproved of his son’s marriage to a Jewish woman.) In a film about questions, some fall away in the family drama.

Yes, artists will find much to like in this film—sumptuous art, the quotidian discipline and physicality of art-making, a compelling score by David Lang—but the film also has much for feminists to ponder about the choice to parent.

The mother, Betty, emerges as the hero, directly addressing the responsibilities of mothering as they intersect with the self. She wanted to “experience” childbirth and mothering, but was terror struck when presented with her infant son, Charlie, Francesca’s older brother, who became a videographer; Betty says baldly, “Maybe I’ve been an absolutely horrible mother.”

She made her pots, used in the household but not to be broken, behind the family house while mothering young children. (Avoiding interruptions presents a challenge for any parent, or anyone, working at home.) Visiting art museums, the Woodmans habitually set the children loose with pads for copying art, while they looked at art uninterrupted. When Betty talks about her daughter, she seems more mother than artist. In contrast, George admits that his daughter’s intensity was what made her interesting to him. Originally an abstract painter, he is now working in photography. Near the end, Betty becomes the triumphant artist, when a commission is installed in the American embassy in Beijing.

The Woodmans started with a faux pas and records a generous baring of lives and scars. Finding answers is left for the audience—like life, or art.

Review by Frances Chapman

Elliott Smith - From A Basement On The Hill

Kill Rock Stars

My indie cred—if you want to call it that—is this: I was at one of Elliott Smith’s last shows. At the Northwestern University A&O Ball in 2002, Smith attempted to open for Wilco, fumbling with his guitar, breaking a string, complaining that his hand fell asleep, and never really finishing a song before trudging off stage an hour later. My friends and I were so angry and disappointed. “Is he on drugs?” If only we’d known the truth. If only anyone had known what was to come. A year and a half later, Smith committed suicide by stabbing himself in the chest.

I love Elliott Smith's music. I’m a sad former college radio nerd who grew up at the height of his popularity. “Miss Misery” is undoubtedly one of my favorite songs, in part because I love any movie shot in Boston and featuring under-the-radar music. But after he died, I couldn’t bring myself to listen to From a Basement on the Hill. Tragically, I’m a pro at handling death in the short term, but posthumous releases sort of freak me out. What’s done is done, right? What does it mean if the artist isn’t here to be a part of the production or release of his or her work? Only recently did I pick up some posthumous 2Pac and feel good about it. A decade later, I apparently come around.

Kill Rock Stars, arbiter of northwestern indie cool, recently got the rights to the 2004 release from ANTI-. Anyone who got a first listen in, well, the past five years, knows that this album is beautiful but sad. Songs like “A Fond Farewell” are reminiscent of XO. Others dabble in noise rock with strange layers of buzzing and bird noises attached. The album, sort of like Smith’s life, feels like a celebration on a rainy day. You could try to be the happiest person in the world, attempting revelry with friends, but inevitably, there will be a dark cloud on the horizon. That’s just how some of us are made.

Such a large percentage of From a Basement on the Hill deals in morbid fare: goodbyes, being a fuck up, memories, drugs, feeling lost, trying to keep it together. I’m not the first to say that it all feels foreboding, even now that we know the end of the story.

But you don’t listen to think back in sadness. You listen to remember why you ever listened at all. Elliott Smith made incredible music during his short time on Earth. If you’re as silly as I was—to largely overlook this album for the last few years—go grab a copy and remember the good times with the floppy-haired guy with the acoustic guitar and mellow voice. And if you never discovered Smith while he was alive, you still have time. Take advantage.

Review by Brittany Shoot