Film festivals are not unfamiliar with courting controversy. It is pretty much unavoidable when many topics are polarizing. Some festivals will try to mitigate some fallout by creating some programming guidelines, for example, most festivals right now are not accepting any films that have connections to the Russian government, but they are not penalizing all Russian filmmakers. However, some festivals seem to court controversy more than others, and Venice is one such festival. Last year, it had the World Premieres of films by Woody Allen and Roman Polanski, this year in their independent parallel section Venice Days, a film’s screening is in limbo with the director blaming Russian censorship, and 300 filmmakers have signed an open letter protesting the inclusion of two “complicit” Israeli films in the festival. One of them is Amos Gitai’s Why War.
Amos Gitai is a filmmaker who’s not unfamiliar with controversy. His first film House (1980) was censored/banned in Israel and after the release of Field Day (1982), which was shot in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank before and during the invasion of Lebanon, he went into self-exile in France for a decade. Born in Haifa he studied as an architect before he became a filmmaker. He says in interviews his “role as an architect is to build bridges, not to burn them.” If you look at his body of work, he is very much trying to create those bridges and conversations and show people that conflict is not the only path.
That was his intention with Why War, which is structured around recitations of correspondence between Einstein and Freud. In the wake of calls for its boycott in Venice, he said in an interview that “the film is not actually focused on Israel Palestine,” but about war in general. However, I think this is a little disingenuous since the film basically opens on scene at a kind of memorial/protest/art installation with poster boards for the hostages from October 7th and places set at a table for them in a public square. In that same interview, Gitai spoke about how he purposely chose not to use images of what is currently happening between Israel and Palestine; however, I think those initial images despite his intentions for more neutrality show some underlying bias. One that can be attributed to him having the same emotional reaction he has noted in others, which he referred to as a traumatized society, so I think it will take away from the space he normally attempts to create since he did not grant a scene of Palestinian mourning the same amount of coverage nor placement.
The way the letters were done as part of a stage production, as basically monologues performed, was interesting and rather unexpected as one would have thought they would have been used as voice-overs over other images/sequences, but this allowed you to really sit with the words and their struggle to make sense of war. It was confusing for these recitations to be done in French since the letters were written in German as it was both of their first language and Einstein, like most Canadians, only knew basic French.
One striking scene in the film brought to mind Martin Scorsese’s The Big Shave. In the scene, Irène Jacob is putting in hair dye, a mundane act, but as she does it gets messier and messier bleeding onto her skin, and the more she does it the more it looks like blood and she gets it on her hands. If the scene in The Big Shavewas viewed as a metaphor for the US’s self-destructive involvement in the Vietnam War, how will the scene in Why War be looked at in the future given the events taking place in Israel-Palestine currently and the filmmaker involved?
Why War had its World Premiere Out of Competition at the 81st annual Venice International Film Festival.
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