It’s about the destruction of the Second Temple, but it’s a feature film, not a documentary, which explores one of the most polarizing events in Jewish history, a charged subject that filmmakers have rarely attempted to dramatize.
It doesn’t focus on the major figures of this era, such as Shimon Bar Giora, Rabbi Yehoshua Ben Gamla or Rabbi Yohanan Ben-Zakai, although they are in the film. Instead, the hero is Ben Batih, a lesser-known figure, a young man who – after some hesitation – took part in the fighting with the zealots against the Romans.
While it is a story that requires the depiction of conflict and fighting on a huge scale, the movie is composed of 1,500 vivid and hauntingly beautiful original paintings, which tell the story. These paintings were created by David Polonsky and Michael Faust, who were responsible for the art in Ari Folman’s 2008 animated documentary about the Lebanon War, Waltz With Bashir. In this case, the drawings are not animated but are presented one after another. It may sound counterintuitive for a story with a great deal of action, but after just a few minutes, the images no longer seemed static and as I think back on the movie, I remember it as though it were animated.
The subject is of historical interest to many, but those in the religious community are especially passionate about it, yet the movie was directed and written by Gidi Dar, a well-known Israeli filmmaker who is secular.
It is Dar’s third major collaboration with Shuli Rand, who voices the main character, Ben Batih. Rand starred in two of Dar’s earlier films, Eddie King, about an actor who gets involved with criminals, and Ushpizin, the story of a newly religious reformed criminal who ends up hosting two of his former associates during the Sukkot holiday. These movies trace the evolution of Rand himself, who was born into a religious Zionist family and later gained fame as an actor living a secular life and starring in such movies as Life According to Agfa, a celebration and critique of Tel Aviv’s café society, and eventually became an ultra-Orthodox devotee of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov. While Dar grew up secular and remains secular, his bond with Rand has given him a window into the religious world.
For Dar, the movie is the culmination of a dream to examine this central and painful historical event and to explore its implications for present-day Israel.
As a young filmmaker, Dar noticed, “The directors who inspired me, like [Martin] Scorsese and [Francis Ford] Coppola, they looked at their own culture and religion. Christianity was an integral part of that culture.”
BUT GROWING up in the secular Israeli community, Dar felt disconnected from the stream of Jewish tradition. “We didn’t have access to what came before 100 years of Zionism,” he said in a recent interview. “We learned something about the bible in school, sure, but there were 2,000 years of the Talmud and Jewish texts, not just the laws, but also the poetry and the legends that we didn’t know enough about... The culture I studied of Europeans and Americans, they had lived in their culture for many years, but Zionism burned the bridge to the Diaspora. I understand why they had that impulse, and it succeeded so well, beyond anyone’s dreams. But at a certain point, it came to a dead end.”
It isn’t that Dar does not respect Zionism. “My grandfather was a pioneer, my parents were committed Zionists, the ‘with our back to the sea’ spirit and they did miracles... But now we have a lot of material goods but we have a spiritual problem... Zionism gave the Torah to the religious community, saying, ‘It’s yours, not mine.’”
He is passionate about his belief that it is crucial for artists to look at the historical and religious past. “We need to create something new. It’s not about becoming religious, we need to look at the past and create something new.”
Israelis, he feels, “are too interested in what is happening in the West. Europe is having a crisis,” as are many other countries around the world.
Partly through his friendship with Rand, he began looking more closely into Jewish history and texts and realized that he remembered little about what he had learned in school. He even studied Gemara with another religious friend. As he researched the subject of the divisions among the Jews during the Roman era, he realized that the destruction of the Second Temple and the events leading up to it would make for riveting drama. He also decided it would be best not to have the well-known figures, such as Ben-Zakai or Shimon Bar Giora, in the forefront.
“In drama, the hero needs to change and all the other characters don’t change, they have a clear and rigid agenda,” he explained. “Only the young Ben Batih vacillates between the two sides and faces conflicts that change him. By the end, he is a very different person than when the story began.”
Ben Batih, Ben-Zakai’s nephew, is a young man who lives with his mother and protects her. When he sees men being beaten in the street because they did not pay the tax levied by the temple priests, at first he does nothing.
“But then he thinks of the words of Ben-Zakai, that if he does not take action, he is not a man,” said Dar.
“It’s like with Shakespeare, ‘To be or not to be,’ only here it is, ‘To do or not to do.’”
Eventually, Ben Batih is drawn into the revolt and acts bravely. Dar does not condemn the zealots, even though many believe that their actions led to the weakening of the Jews in the fight against the Romans.
“I thought that they [the zealots] are pure, they are willing to fight to the end in their quest for justice,” he said. “He sees injustice and he realizes if you don’t do anything you are a coward, while if you do something, it can lead to ruin.”
He sees parallels between the situation leading up to the destruction of the temple to the political discord of today, both in Israel and in countries around the world, particularly those with entrenched, corrupt dictatorships.
“You can’t put up with corruption forever... I’m not a communist but I believe in justice.”
HE FELT a pull to tell this story as quickly as possible – “It was stronger than me” – but partly due to the decision to tell it through paintings, it took years. While the actors who voice the main characters are a veritable Who’s Who of Israeli cinema – in addition to Rand, Ze’ev Revach is Ben Gamla, Amos Tamam is Bar Giora, Moni Moshonov is Ben-Zakai, Yael Abecassis is Queen Berniki and Igal Naor is John of Giscala – he decided the best way to bring the story to life was to use paintings. He collaborated closely with his artists, Polonsky and Faust, and produced a short film version to see if it would work. He felt that it did and went on to create the full-length film.
“There is something even more beautiful because it doesn’t move,” he said. Although it was a long painstaking process, he thinks that the final result was worth all the trouble. “I think you look at it differently, when you don’t have to follow moving images, your imagination fills in the gaps and you get into the rhythm.”
He is pleased at the reactions the film has gotten at preview screenings and especially happy that it has aroused interest in the religious community, particularly at several packed screenings at the Jerusalem Cinematheque, where the audiences, including Communications Minister Yoaz Hendel, were riveted by the film and the Q&As lasted long past the allotted time.
“It made me very happy,” he said. “I was afraid that they would feel I am blaming them, but they loved it, I received many compliments.”
While he is gratified by the reception that the film has gotten so far in Israel, he is eager to show it abroad as well and it has been acquired for international distribution by Memento International, which handled Call Me By Your Name. He is optimistic that the issues raised by the film will resonate with audiences everywhere.
“They are all right in a way,” he said of the story’s factions. “They were right all the way to hell... I hope everyone before they blame the other side, will look at themselves. Every side needs to look within.”