Disengagement sails through and melts mental and emotional and physical boundaries.
Dutch-Palestinians, French-Israelis, an American living in Sweden performing in German who works with refugees worldwide for the UN (Barbra Hendricks), Orthodox Jews cultivating life in Canaan.
The journey begins with a fixed, normalized prelude to a transcultural tryst punctuated by a molecular twist that expresses the grand themes of the film, glides through an urban Avignon landscape that could readily be the urban landscape of Gaza City or Tel Aviv or Singapore or Chicago or Los Angeles or London or Cape Town or Dubai or Naples, languidly lilts in choreography through the lush vermilion interiour of an Avignon estate owned by a deceased French Jew whose death brings together his hypersensual sophisticated Dutch-Palestinian daughter (who resonates the biblical Delilah) and solemn French-Israeli son (an adopted step-son who resonates with the biblical Samson as he evades her sybaritic act of seduction), and from that moment forward the film showcases womankind on the verge of a mental breakdown because of barriours (erected by whom?) of interiour fires that are smiting her already-burnt-out identity.
From the stable, controlled, prosperity of her Avignon life, Ana, a disengaged Dutch-Palestinian who thinks herself a coward who has died many times before her death, takes emotional flight as she embarks on a transcontinental voyage to the 2000 heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: Gaza. There resides her life-pulse - her Palestinian heritage and the daughter she abandoned as a child, an Orthodox Jewish resident of Gaza who is being forcibly disengaged from her Palestinian homeland. Her inner turmoil externalizes itself and blazes forth in wave after wave of passionate emotion the closer and closer she approaches the soil of Gaza, the flesh of her daughter, and the soul of her ancestry. As Israelis betray Israelis, and Palestinians betray Palestinians, and both betray each other, the landscape is completely ruptured and deterritorialized, the pillars of life in Gaza are pulled down, our identities are stripped away, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Jewish-Palestinian identity struggles and patriarchal hierarchy are shattered, and all that is left are these new lines of unregulated emotions and human relationships which are destined to shatter all further resistance and counterattacks and disengagement.
Place to place, religion to religion, culture to culture, multicultures interweaving into hybrid polycultures, we circumnavigate this globe throughout our lives, we become disengaged from who we are and who we were and who we will be, the forces of life compelling us to absorb all identities and histories, the forces of life compelling those same identities and histories to melt away into one undeniable truth - we are all of the same flesh and blood, our history and culture and identity are shared, and only through disengagement can we perceive reality with clarity, and only through disengagement can we shatter the stranglehold of the Israeli-Palestinian deadlock and shatter the borders and begin to construct one united plane of existence.
Amos presented the crux of the Israel/Arab issue brilliantly. The decision to say, okay, fine, you win, we'll kick all the undesirables out of Gaza to make you happy, we'll make sure that all Arabs stay here and all Jews stay there and none of you have to ever engage each other again, out of sight out of mind no more engagement no more interaction, we'll ignore the fact that your histories and cultures and religions and societies are irrevocably engaged/fused-together, we'll ignore the fact that your very flesh and bone is bone and the same, we'll ignore the fact that disengagement (emotional and psychological and political and religious and cultural and social, not merely physical exile) is the very reason why the Israeli-Arab conflict began, we'll ignore the fact that "disengagement" acts in opposition to the very goals the people who want "disengagement" claim to pursue, we'll ignore the fact that you can't create a stable society when the cornerstone of the society is predicated upon disengagement, you can't solve any of the issues in this world by "disengaging", disengagement is antithetical to existence, to creation, to communication, to building cross-cultural coalitions across the planet, to perpetuating humanity.
Barbra Hendricks has lived throughout Europe, she's of African descent, a minority diaspora, like diaspora Jews and Palestinians and others. The significance of her presence parallels and re-enforces the film's questions and themes. She is an avatar for Amos Gitai: consider his own "disengaged" statelessness/rootlessness: Israeli Jew constantly on the move, dual citizen of France, speaks multiple languages, artistically productive on a far-reaching scale, political/social activist, his films an operatic lament over retrogression and depravity and failures within the political/social/cultural canvases of Judaism and Israel, Hendricks singing over loss of a Worldly American-European Jew who lived beyond boundaries. She is a also a foil to Ana - the former decided to be a citizen of the world and left the US and lived her life to the fullest, the latter (Ana) became trapped in confusion over her identity, dispossessed and disengaged and alienated and drifting. Hendricks and Gitai are trying to heal the dispossessed and disengaged of the world, and they speak in many languages to achieve this goal, the language of music and cinema, the language of compassion and humanity, the language of politics and society, the languages of American and French and Italian and German and Hebrew and Arab....
Compare Hendricks to the Palestinian and Israeli (specifically, ultra-Orthodox Jewry) - they feel they cannot live, cannot exist, unless they live self-autonomously in their (shared) ancestral homeland, their sole goal the achievement of self-determination within their historic homeland, without which they feel they are being ground under foot and obliterated from the tables of memory. Hendricks represents the opposite, people who never let boundaries/demographics define them, people who feel their home is the entire world, possibilities endless, people who do not allow themselves to be solely defined by borders and ancestries and geographical locations, people who engage themselves with the world in its entirety.
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