Israeli cinema explores guilt and redemption — Jerusalem Post
In Israel, filmmakers are turning to themes of guilt, sin, forgiveness and redemption in family dramas, comedies, and films about wartime experiences and public responsibility. The Jerusalem Post writes about this, analyzing Israeli films inspired by Jewish life and religious tradition.
These motifs are also present in comedies. The 2019 film Forgiveness tells the story of two friends who commit a robbery: one flees, while the other goes to prison. While his friend serves his sentence, the fugitive becomes religious and, after his friend's release, tries to atone for his guilt. In Ephraim Kishon's 1964 comedy Sallah Shabati, the protagonist complains to God about his family's suffering in a new land.
Family stories
In his upcoming film Our Loves, due to be released in Israel on October 15 and to open the Haifa International Film Festival, director Avi Nesher portrays retired general Shabi. The hero seeks to atone for leaving his family and restore his relationship with his daughter Liri. According to the plot, on October 6, 2023, Shabi tries to force his ex-wife through the courts to sell the family home. The following morning, during large-scale attacks led by Hamas, Liri finds herself in a kibbutz near the Gaza Strip border, which militants infiltrate. Her father heads south to save her.
Nesher also explored the complex relationships between parents and children in the films The Other Story, The Secrets, Past Life, and The Matchmaker. In these films, the characters reconsider family secrets, past actions, and the experience of the Holocaust.
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War and public responsibility
Ari Folman's 2008 animated documentary Waltz with Bashir is devoted to the director's attempts to recover memories of his participation in the First Lebanon War. Folman speaks with veterans who experience guilt in different ways over their inability to prevent the massacre of Palestinians committed by Christian militias in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in 1982.
In Eytan Fox's Walk on Water, a Mossad agent experiences guilt over his wife's suicide and his actions during service. Samuel Maoz's film Foxtrot tells of soldiers who accidentally kill unarmed Palestinians and conceal it. In Synonyms, which won the Golden Bear at the 2019 Berlin International Film Festival, Nadav Lapid addresses a character's self-hatred linked to Israeli domination over Palestinians.
In Ayelet Menahemi's Seven Blessings, a woman returns from Paris to her family in Israel and confronts the consequences of having been given as a child to her childless aunt to raise. In Esty Shushan's The Book of Ruth, a Haredi man tries to atone for his guilt after the accidental death of a child through increasingly strict religiosity, while his wife tries to find a way to forgive him.
