Yoffi! Yalla Bye. - Shorts from Israel
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This year, after the recent programmes on Iran and Lebanon, the Hamburg ISFF will take a closer look at Israel, the third country in the so-called Middle East which boasts a thriving short film scene. For quite a while now, Israeli films have been well represented in the Festival's international competitions. Nine film schools regularly submit their graduates' films, a staggering number for a country only marginally larger than Wales and with fewer inhabitants than London. By the same token, the country's independent video art and film scene has also been attracting a lot of attention over recent years.
The question of whether or not there is any point in compiling programmes by country has been the subject of much debate at the Festival, but, as with the Lebanese films last year, the answer is comparatively evident in the case of Israel. A programme of recent Israeli shorts cannot (and should not) present or project the idea of a unified national film culture, visual language or aesthetics. Rather, the films we will be showing are simply connected in that they react or refer back to certain social and political realities. When we set out on our task, we were more or less agreed that we wanted to compile an expressly topical and political programme that would bring together as many different perspectives as possible and would present an alternative to the TV news footage European audiences have come to expect from Israel. But in the course of previewing over 400 recent Israeli shorts, it became clear to us just how unnecessary such planning had been.
Works about seemingly private matters like sexuality, family structures or growing up effortlessly established a connection between their subject matter and concrete social and historical conditions. Even the most trite student sex comedy would almost unfailingly touch upon the cultural and economic issues of immigration, questions about the ownership and use of land, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, the militarization of society, the country's 60-year history marked by wars and internal struggle, or the experience of the Holocaust, inextricably linked to the State of Israel. There was hardly a trace of the obscure reflections on filmic material, abstract animations or autobiographical introspective meanderings otherwise so often encountered in the previewing process. Instead, we found films that were obviously the product of a highly politicised society with a strong penchant for contentious debate. Not unlike the many people from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem who helped us to compile the programme, the 27 films it now consists of position themselves very quickly and clearly without ever opting for the easy answer, and they directly demand critical reactions from their audience.
