"Ahed's Knee", the salutary cinematographic madness of Israeli director Nadav Lapid

Avshalom Pollak plays director Y in "Le Genou d'Ahed" by Nadav Lapid.

© Pyramide Films

Text by: Siegfried Forster Follow

4 min

It was one of the films that rocked and impressed the most at the Cannes Film Festival where it won the Jury Prize.

This Wednesday, September 15,

Le Genou d'Ahed,

by Israeli director Nadav Lapid, is released in theaters in France.

A sharp, autobiographical, political and poetic film, always on the cutting edge, between politico-cinematographic manifesto, radical documentary and theatrical parable.

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The opening scene is as violent as it is sordid.

Imprisoned by the occupation army, summoned to an office that looks like a police station, the young Palestinian activist Ahed is confronted with her past.

At 16, she slapped a soldier, her sister and brother were killed by the army, her father thrown in jail.

To put an end to his activities against the established order and the repressive machinery of the government, a far-right Israeli deputy suggests shooting him in the kneecap and placing him under house arrest for life.

"

Where is your victory

?

"

Thus, Ahed's knee makes its grand entrance into history. Framed in close-up, this key part for every movement of the body begins to dance and sing. " 

Where is your victory

? In martyrdom.

 "Let the madness begin ... Gradually, we realize that all the facts told are indeed real. This is the story of Palestinian activist Ahed Tamimi, who became an icon of resistance to colonization after her sentence in 2017 to eight months in prison.

In his film, Nadav Lapid embeds this episode in the form of a casting organized by director Y, the filmmaker's alter ego.

Y, visibly too disturbed to choose his main character for Ahed, decides to take his mind off things.

Broke and very affected by his mother's cancer (a character with whom Nadav Lapid mourns his own mother, editor of his previous films, who died in 2018), he agrees to accompany the screening of his most famous film in a small town of 3000 inhabitants in the middle of the desert.

And it is not insignificant that the small airliner that takes Y to the Arava desert is simultaneously transporting soldiers who are supposed to defend the occupied territories.

Orders and convictions

Because, far from everything, the repression felt turns out to be the same. Even in these remote areas, Israel, denounced by Y as " 

a nationalist and racist Jewish state

 ", reframes and oppresses each dissenting opinion, requires each artist to fill out a form with the themes discussed. On site, the committed director is greeted by Yahalom (Nur Fibak, magnificent), young, beautiful, intelligent and incredibly attractive. His passion for books and his conviction that culture is a means of liberation and emancipation have boosted his career. She was appointed Deputy Director of Libraries at the Ministry of Culture. A position that forces him to carry out orders completely against his beliefs.

It is on this ground, or rather quicksand, that Nadav Lapid, winner of the Golden Bear at the 2019 Berlinale for 

Synonyms

builds his screenplay of formidable and diabolical efficiency. When Y tells Yahalom about his terrible experiences of hazing and torture during military service, no one can guess his role in this story or that these are memories of Nadav Lapid's war in Lebanon. In this space between what we display and what we hide, Lapid takes pleasure in deconstructing Israeli society and this state which “ 

spews out everything that is different

 ”. 

Admittedly, the film's point of view is decided, but despite its repeated charges against the policies of the State of Israel, it avoids being Manichean.

The filmmaker highlights the extent to which Israeli citizens tear and destroy each other, and reveals the degree of mistrust, contempt and aggression each assimilated because of the policy of oppression imposed.

"

The last minute of this day

"

The Israeli director's camera play is extraordinary and makes every shot alive and confusing. Written in just two weeks, shot with very little means, the result is astounding with intelligence and inventiveness. For some sequences, Lapid makes the camera dance, in fusion with the very sensitive acting skills of Avshalom Pollak, who is also a choreographer and artistic director of a dance company.

Scene by scene, image by image, it surprises us or makes us laugh, for example when it marks its territory by urinating on the sand.

To his dying mother, he sends the sunset with the dedication: " 

the last minute of this day

 ".

Beautiful metaphor for the urgency of this film and a heartbreaking farewell to both his mother and his country, because, in the meantime, exhausted by the political situation in Israel, David Lapid has settled with his family in Paris.

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