This is a different way to think about Israel and Palestine and to hear from people you haven't heard from. Ofra Bloch is a good interviewer and the people she interviews are not always happy with the questions she asks and she is not always happy with the answers. This is a brave personal movie. It's uncomfortable and thoughtful in a way few movies are these days.
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kfrischer12 January 2020
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pberen12 January 2020Ofra Block a psychoanalyst and filmmaker powerfully engages in interviewing second generation Germans and Palestinians. She herself as interviewer- participant forced me as a member of the audience to confront past and current history and my own hard held beliefs and prejudices. She did this by showing what the act of truly listening to people who we look upon as enemies and who do not hold our personal views can be a gesture of taking responsibility. Her film raises many questions and does not attempt to give solutions. However what it does do is to put us on alert not to turn away from past history or our current political realities and to take heed and remember our humanity and that we are all in this together. It is also beautifully filmed and needs to be seen.
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sarah_hill-7338912 January 2020If you are someone who likes to contemplate the complexity of human relations without looking for easy answers, this is the film for you. Ofra is a shining example of how to stay engaged with all sides of a traumatic situation so that each voice can be heard in its unique wisdom. She does not force interpretation, but allows the viewer to reach deep into themselves, in order to be touched by the various forms of suffering.
A hopeful vision of the transformative power of true presence, and authentic listening. This film is an excellent tool for teaching, and raising deep questions. -
daniquisenberry12 January 2020A compassionate exploration of global wounds and the role of deep listening as a tool for healing ourselves and others. We are transformed as we participate in a deeply personal journey of an experienced psychoanalyst and filmmaker who travels across the globe to witness the stories of people she was taught to hate and fear. She attempts to ask without judgment the hard questions that will help her better understand global Transgenerational Trauma. She begins a conversation that may move us toward the possibility of a world without the cultural, political and religious violence that has created a rend in our moral universe. In the process, the director becomes her own subject and learns a lesson that alters the way she sees forever.
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brunhildkring14 January 2020Afterward
As a post World War II German gentile, this documentary really speaks to me.
Ofra Bloch, the director, is an Israeli-born psychoanalyst/filmmaker who has been living in New York for many decades. She uses the movie to highlight and listen to the voice of the "Other", e.g. the very people she was taught to hate such as Germans and Palestinians. She examines the dialectic between victims and victimizers. Her interviews with second and third generation descendants of Nazi perpetrators and with contemporary Palestinians living under Israeli occupation are haunting.
Bloch puts herself repeatedly into the film. We follow her from Germany to Israel and to Palestine. She uses her own story as a narrative arc, employs her professional interview skills and probes her subjects' most intense emotional quandaries.
The opening scene shows Bloch as a child in Israel helping her great uncle who lost his family in a concentration camp carry home a block of ice for refrigeration. Was this image meant to show how people can react to trauma by freezing the memories and fossilizing the hatred it created? Further historical black and white footage alludes to the shadows of history we all carry.
The movie raises profound questions. What legacy did we inherit from our parents and grandparents and what legacy do we want to leave our children? Are people capable of learning from history or are we doomed to repeat the cycles of aggression, revenge and more aggression? Is forgiveness and peaceful co-existence after such intense chronic conflict possible?
Will listening to the voice of the "Other", meaning the victims of our aggression, recognizing their pain and mourning their losses move the needle towards reconciliation? Or, are all parties pawns in a larger geopolitical imperialist struggle for hegemony in the Middle East that no acts of human kindness and neighborly cooperation can ever hope to halt?
The title of the movie implies that there there is an Afterward. It is a deeply felt and timely must see documentary. -
susan-3543014 January 2020This film should be seen by everyone. It provides a deeply moving, sensitive, insightful and thought provoking understanding of current attitudes and historical antecedents to the current climate in Israel and Palestine. I grew up in a community that was deeply connected to Israel where many people traveled there and chose to live there as adults and spoke of Palestinians only with extreme derision. As an adult I learned that the full story was more complex than I had known.
This film portrays Israelis and Palestinians in their full humanity. Perhaps when people begin to reach across the historical divide and fully appreciate the humanness of their "enemies" a lasting peace may become possible.
Everyone should see this film! -
Through a series of conversations with the German children of Nazi officers, Palestinians, and her own reflections, Ofra / the filmmaker, examines her own past growing up in Israel, moving to the United States, and the ongoing inter-generational trauma experienced by all sides. This is a movie that haunts you with the questions, courage, and wisdom of all the speakers, by talking with each other honestly about their past, present, and possible future.
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kellylynnbassett13 January 2020Afterward is a moving and courageous film about Ofra Bloch's personal journey of processing her own trauma and confronting her role in indirectly traumatizing others. It challenges us all to think about how this applies to us personally and to our world order in general. It was moving, provocative, and beautifully done. It's an important film to see.
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scratchthat200931 January 2020Taking a few stars off because the editing and perspectives lacked. To elaborate on perspectives, it didn't feel 100% complete. I think that we got a lot of Palestinian points of view but not Israelis. I'm aware that the filmmaker herself is Israeli but I still think we would've gained a lot more with a balanced number of Israeli citizens being interviewed. She as one person doesn't represent several Israelis. Overall, though, this film achieved its main goal to say that we're all human and we all deserve peace - there must be another way. The Israeli filmmaker and the Palestinian interviewees spoke in a respectable way while also latently addressing slight tensions. It also used visuals in proper ways, showing what it needed without overstimulating, and I liked how it wasn't overly chopped in the interview bits, so we could really see the microexpressions and body language.
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Turfseer16 January 2020Ofra Bloch is an Israeli-born psychotherapist who has been living in the United States for over thirty years. In a recent Q&A, Bloch revealed that she began creating her first documentary intending to focus exclusively on the adult children of former Nazis and their perspective on the Holocaust. But soon she concluded that it would be much more illuminating if she also interviewed Palestinians whose perspective on the Holocaust is quite different from the group of sympathetic Germans she ultimately ended up including in the film.
The German interviews (which also includes an interview with a younger man, a former neo-Nazi) reveal shocking revelations about their (now deceased) parents, who even after the war, still harbored feelings of pride in belonging to and participating in the activities of the Nazi party. For these adult children, the Holocaust is a mark of shame and they continue to struggle with feelings of guilt over their parents' moral failure before, during and after World War II.
Bloch is less successful in her segments involving interviews with Palestinians. On the plus side, Bloch allows her Palestinian interviewees to fully express themselves, realizing that proposing any alternative arguments might cause them to "shut down," undermining her goal to elicit a full expression of their point of view.
Sadly, virtually all of her Palestinian subjects come off as sad, bitter and extremely angry. Only one professor, who was fired from his university job and labeled a traitor, after bringing Palestinian students to see Auschwitz first-hand, comes off as someone who can truly appreciate "the other side's" perspective. For the rest, the Holocaust is seen as another way for the Jewish people to justify the "occupation" of Israel-in their view, the Jews use the Holocaust to present themselves as perennial victims, to justify what they regard as nefarious, "racist" behavior.
Bloch seeks credit for her "openness" in "listening" to the Palestinian point of view. Indeed, the value of her film is that we do get to hear the Palestinian perspective-but after the interviews are over, Bloch fails to comment on what we've just heard and fails to present opposing points of view on the Israeli side. Thus, uneducated people might assume that all of what the Palestinians have to say is completely true and legitimate (when of course there are always two sides to a story).
Bloch trots out a Palestinian peace activist whose 12 year old daughter was killed by an Israeli soldier a little more than a decade ago. In so doing, Bloch is attempting to engender an unbalanced sympathy for the Palestinian cause. Lost of course is the knowledge of the countless Israeli victims of Palestinian perfidy. Had Bloch interviewed at least one Israeli parent who lost a child at the hands of a Palestinian terrorist (and perhaps brought those two parents together), her narrative would have proved to be much more balanced (and shall I say, fair?).
Also lost is Bloch's assessment of what the Palestinians are really saying when they use the Arab word "Nabka" (catastrophe) to describe the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. True, many Palestinians were displaced following Israeli independence and lost their homes. But at the same time, hundreds of thousands of Jewish people were summarily thrown out of their native Arab lands in 1948 with only the shirts on their backs. There is no measure of sympathy for those people, who were forced to come to Israel and other countries, many against their will.
Of course the displacement of people following wars is always a sorrowful event. But the Palestinians aren't the only people who have experienced this (as was just pointed out about Jewish people in Arab lands). But in the case of the Holocaust, this was something different. The Jewish people were not "displaced" by the Nazis-they were exterminated. And for the survivors, they had nowhere else to go. They took the opportunity to settle in the one place they could be welcome (and completely legitimately, as Palestine was promised to the Jewish people by the British government in the Balfour Declaration of 1917).
The negative attitude is embodied in Bloch's interview of what one might term her counterpart: a female Palestinian therapist who in her hatred of all things Israeli, attempts to justify outright murder by terrorists whom she regards as "freedom fighters." The attitude belies a deep sense of victimization in which at its root, the vast majority of Palestinians believe that Israel should not exist and the Jewish people should abandon Israel and find a new land to live in.
During the Q&A I attended, Bloch conceded that she was "uncomfortable" with some of the views espoused by some of her interviewees (particularly by this "therapist"). But unfortunately she's clearly reluctant to push back against this in her documentary by providing some reflective commentary following the interviews.
By no means should we conclude that everyone in Israel has a constructive attitude toward the Palestinians (particularly in the harsh attitude of the Settlers). "Afterward" makes clear however, that the Palestinians will never better themselves until they engage in more reflective self-criticism. -
Bloch's even-handed approach to the fraught history between the Germans and the Jews and the Palestinians and the Israelis, plus her honesty about her own prejudices, contribute to the success of this film both as documentary and personal history. Highly recommended.
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The film documents a personal journey to address a long standing hatred and fear of Germans that takes the narrator from childhood walks with her uncle, to Israel face to face with Palestinians discussing the occupation. Through a dozen or more interviews Ofra discusses her own past growing up in Israel, examines the trauma wounding both sides, and asks what our responsibility and complicity is now. These are not questions answered by the film; the audience is allowed to see each person in their full humanity and to try to answer for themselves as she traces the decisions she and her family have made along the way. A very powerful and compelling story that has stayed with me for days after seeing this moving film.
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elizabethbergermd13 January 2020Ofra Bloch's full-length film "Afterward" is a beautifully realized study of her own search for self-knowledge as a Jewish Israeli, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, examining first her relationship with Germans and then her relationship with Palestinians. In-depth interviews display the power of genuine interactions in which both parties strive for honesty of expression and for authentic openness to the "other." The centrality of the Holocaust and the Nakba, and the relationship between these two devastations, are explored without sensationalism. This film should be viewed widely by young and old--not only those narrowly "affected" by these histories, but the global public. In an era of simple slogans and the politics of hate, this film stands out as a demand--one that Ofra Bloch makes first and foremost of herself--to confront the recognition of suffering and responsibility in all its complexity, sorrow, and necessity.
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noraberk15 January 2020Ofra Block, has correctly named her documentary film "Afterward". The questions about the oversimplified beliefs I have held, were not only challenged during this documentary, but continue to be in my mind, long afterward. Ms. Block was born and raised in Israel among Holocaust survivors. the film documents her personal and physical journeys, to examine her life long prejudices, through of series of interviews and encounters with a number of remarkable Palestinians and Germans. These interviews and her ability to listen deeply enables the audience to hear and think about truths that may be different from ours. To consider how her identity and the identity of " The Other" were formed. She brings to our awareness the need to pay attention to and learn about the past, and alerts us to how it can repeat itself in the present. She does not preach, nor offer solutions, but ends with the feeling that maybe through listening we can make space in our minds for the thoughts and experiences of on another.
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cschmidt-4214513 January 2020Filmmaker-psychoanalyst Ofra Bloch embraces the universal urgency of the cry "Never Again". She extends this call for collective recognition to victims of the Nazi Holocaust and to Palestinians whose humanity is being erased by the Israeli state. As we viewers accompany her journey to examine her hatred of the unknown other, we see her overcome her own fears. Honesty is the price. This is a hopeful film.
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dftnet29 January 2020This is an extraordinary film by and about an extraordinary human being. An Israeli-American psychoanalyst specializing in second and third generation trauma sets out to explore how German descendants of Nazis are faring, and how they are handling their own trauma about the Holocaust. Her own fundamental honesty and insistence on personal truth causes her to recognize her parallel need to expand her inquiry to Palestinians, the other hated group from her childhood. How difficult this must be, and how excruciating to pursue this quest, this time as the perpetrator of trauma. Nothing is solved here - she is no sentimentalist - but we see an honesty and a perseverance that is personal, public, rare in our time and to be emulated. WASPs, people raised in power and privilege, those whose lives bask in the appearance of power and privilege, we should all listen up. This is hard, and Dr. Bloch has pursued the path. Thank you.
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sronsen-8934712 January 2020This heart-wrenching film by the psychoanalyst Ofra Bloch is about listening to those whose voices are rarely heard- the Palestinians. Ms. Bloch, an Israeli living in the U.S. for 40 years, begins her journey in Germany where she interviews second and third generation non-Jewish Germans whose family members lived through the Holocaust. She is concerned with the intergenerational transmission of trauma and the process of "othering." This leads her to reflect on her own birth country's treatment of its "other"- Palestinians. It is a moral and psychological reckoning for Bloch . She does not flinch from revealing her conscious and unconscious biases before the making of the film but the film is her confrontation with them. Through multiple interviews with Palestinian activists,, professors, artists and a psychiatrist her own ears open hearing, and ultimately empathizing with,the other. In doing so she provides us a beginning step in resolving this intractable conflict -through genuine dialogue hope is seeded.
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audreyjacobson13 January 2020With remarkable insight, empathy and courage, Bloch brings a rare sensitivity to a painful and difficult subject - the Holocaust, the Nakba, and the Occupation - while offering a ray of hope for a path forward to mutual understand and reconciliation between opposing communities, each with their unique histories of trauma. A truly important, sensitive and inspiring film.
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celwin-4871612 January 2020This is a smart, thoughtful, nuanced, humane, and fearless documentary on a difficult and urgent topic. Bloch's skills as a psychoanalyst serve her well in lucidly raising thorny questions and welcoming unexpected answers. The back-and forth between Germany and Palestine and the shifting of her own status (oscillating between oppressed and oppressor) works beautifully. There is a lot of attention paid to detail, resulting in many memorable moments.