Shot in black-and-white, in the period “before the Third World War,” as the opening credits state, the film was made in collaboration with students from the Seminar Hakibutzim acting school in Tel Aviv. Kolirin has previously highlighted, in films such as Let It Be Morning and The Band’s Visit, the painfully absurd dynamics between Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Arabs. In his latest film, he focuses on people caught between routine and memory, inner exile and external pressure – a post-apocalyptic mindset, history behind them, and trapped in a fragmented present that hangs by a thread.
Little remains here off the admittedly rudimentary coexistence that formed the basis of Kolirin’s earlier films. An officer shouting at his subordinates as he demands that they give their all for the shooting of a new series for a globally well-known streaming service; a woman attending with puzzled kindness to two technicians digging a pit in her garden; a couple hauling a load of snow into the desert with a truck without ever really reaching their destination. Myths and period-specific details from various eras and circumstances are as incongruous with the plot as the ‘situation’ is – politically, militarily, and in a more general sense – with personal aspirations. Film references – time and again Theo Angelopoulos – and old propaganda songs serve as imaginary constants in this turbulent inner landscape of an increasingly fragmented society. A cinematically fascinating, offbeat tour de force, whose associations are reflected back, from the rough edges of ‘the situation’, into the audience’s view long before the narrative has reached its conclusion. Not just in Israel.
Text: Bernd Buder