Across three chapters, with extraordinary precision in editing, cinematography, archival work, and research, Shooting explores arenas in which image and violence become entangled. The first act, “Remake”, shows how the reconstruction of a war for a film production sparked real panic and drove residents of a village in the Golan Heights to flee. In “Action”, a Palestinian family in East Jerusalem watches in horror as the television news presents weapons in their home that were never there. “Props”, the concluding part, focuses on a veteran weapons collector who looks back on a past shaped by objects that have turned violence into a craft.
In her extraordinary work, Netalie Braun creates a resonant and haunting trilogy about the point where Israeli cinema meets the mechanisms of power, and about the psychological and cultural cost of that encounter. Suspended between documentation, fiction, testimony, and reenactment, the film opens a space for rethinking the ethics of looking and the destructive social and personal consequences of a militarized reality that became a second nature. Shooting examines not only what cameras capture, but also its blind spots: what it misses, conceals, and the reality they actively help reshape.
Text: Nir Ferber