FRANKFURT Ra’anan Alexandrowicz takes a critical look at the situation in the Middle East. The German Film Institute and Film Museum has screened three documentaries by the Israeli filmmaker and activist.
From Joshua Schößler
Ra’anan Alexandrowicz’s office on the Westend Campus of Frankfurt’s Goethe University is sparsely furnished. It is located in the building of the “Normative Orders” research center. The Israeli filmmaker is working there temporarily as a fellow of the “ConTrust” research initiative. And it is here that he takes the time to talk to us while the German Film Institute and Film Museum (DFF) has been showing three of his films over the past two days.
Alexandrowicz was born in Jerusalem in 1969. “My father’s family fled Poland in 1939 before the Nazi invasion, my mother immigrated from Belgium in the late 1960s.” Alexandrowicz grew up in West Jerusalem. From 1991 to 1996, he studied film studies at the Sam Spiegel Film and Television School in Jerusalem. His political and cinematic development happened simultaneously in the nineties, he says. “At that time, I understood the political indoctrination under which one grows up in Israeli society.” Israel and Palestine are the same place, but two different forms of consciousness. “Film is a medium to break through these barriers of consciousness,” says Alexandrowicz.
In his fellowship, he examines the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in film. “We are looking at the first film recordings of Palestine and how Zionism discovered the power of film for itself.” In other words, the power of film for Israeli state-building will be examined. “Is film a means of recording history or of shaping it?”
Alexandrowicz also poses the question of how film and truth relate to each other in his own films. “A documentary film differs from a fictional film in that it addresses factual truth more directly.” In a fictional film about Nelson Mandela, however, you can get much closer to the truth than in a documentary that only uses historical material. After all, there are different forms of truth. “Personal truth is different from factual truth.”
The screening of the three films at the DFF is the result of a cooperation with the research initiative “ConTrust”. They will be shown as a trilogy and address the Israeli occupation in the Palestinian territories in different ways.
For “The Law In These Parts” (2011), Alexandrowicz brought former Israeli military lawyers in front of the camera. They were involved in the legal protection of the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank after the Six-Day War in 1967. Alexandrowicz wants to trace the parallel justice under which the Arabs lived in these areas at that time. He asks the military judges about the democratic and human rights legitimacy of decisions that were made decades ago in some cases. They sit in front of a green screen on which historical film footage from this period of occupation is shown. Alexandrowicz thus puts the elderly judges themselves in the dock of the documentary film.
“The Inner Tour” from 2001 is much more humorous and received an honorable mention for best documentary feature at the Vancouver International Film Festival. In this film, Alexandrowicz accompanies a Palestinian travel group from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip on a bus tour through Israel. Through the eyes of one of these travelers, the viewer is offered a view of Israel that differs greatly from the usual images of those years. The second intifada began in September 2000.
Alexandrowicz clearly sees himself as an activist. As he admits in “The Law In These Parts”, the filmmaker decides for himself what is true and what is not in his films. Making a documentary film, he says, is mainly about deciding in the edit what to leave out and what not.
Alexandrowicz’s views on the truth are clearly evident in “The Viewing Booth” (2019). Here, he shows film footage to the American, Jewish and pro-Israeli student Maia Levy. The footage comes from the human rights organization B’Tselem and documents the Israeli military presence in the West Bank. While Levy watches the footage, Alexandrowicz films her face and captures her reactions. Six months later, he shows her the footage and confronts her with it.
“Maia sees Israeli soldiers waking up a Palestinian family and says she lacks the context to appreciate the scene,” says Alexandrowicz: “But tens of thousands of Palestinians have had this experience. That’s the context I wanted her to recognize.”
He has observed the debates at American universities since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 with great concern. “For many people, October 7 is a binary issue,” says Alexandrowicz. On the one hand, there are the pro-Palestinian voices, on the other the pro-Israeli voices: “But I don’t have a nationalistic approach to the issue, I have a human approach. Above all, I see the pain that prevails on both sides.” He could not decide which pain was more important.
Nevertheless, it is important for him to emphasize that he considers the Israeli military operation in Gaza to be genocide. “Human life was disregarded on both sides. On the Palestinian side, however, the numbers are much higher,” he says. But perhaps for Alexandrowicz this is also part of the realm of personal truth. He has lived with his family in the United States for eight years.
By Joshua Schößler. From the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of February 13, 2025, No. 37, Rhein-Main-Zeitung, p. 16 © All rights reserved. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung GmbH, Frankfurt. Provided by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Archive