This is a time of sadness for filmmakers and film fanatics both, because of the untimely and unnecessary death of the gifted actress Natasha Richardson.
Many have commented on her wonderful performances, but I'm haunted now by a film in which she didn't appear.
In "Love Actually," one of the best chickflix of all times, Liam Neeson, Richardson's husband, plays a man whose wife has just died, leaving behind a small boy for him to raise alone. We see the two at the funeral, and we watch as the they try to carry on with their lives. We even get to watch both of them fall in love.
Neeson's performance is so moving, his pain is so real, his heartbreak so convincing, that it's hard not to imagine the kind of pain he's feeling now. We've already experienced something like that with him.
Our hearts go out to the Redgrave, Richardson and Neeson families.
On a happier note, I'm delighted to report that credit for the one-minute, all-female, high-energy, thoroughly enjoyable opener at each screening of the festival belongs to our own Merry Elder. Great job!
TO SEE IF I'M SMILING by Tamar Yarom
If you want some additional insight into the American women at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, see this heartbreaking Israeli film.
I saw it on Wednesday evening. On Thursday morning, the news broke that several Israeli soldiers were claiming to the newspapers that "Palestinian civilians were killed and Palestinian property intentionally destroyed" during the recent offensive in the Gaza Strip. (http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/03/19/israel.gaza.idf)
According to reports I heard on the BBC, the complaints were made to the Israeli Defense Forces two weeks ago. But the IDF only opened its investigation a few hours after the papers hit the street on Thursday.
"Israeli Defense minister Ehud Barak told Army Radio Thursday that 'Israel has the most moral army in the world' and that the testimonies will be checked carefully," according to CNN.
Ehud Barak needs to see this movie.
Made in 2007, the documentary features the stories of six young women who served in the IDF - a two-year rotation is mandatory for all 18-year-old Israeli youth, male and female.
Yarom has included a lot of footage of the IDF at the West Bank and Gaza. The borders are like your worst images of high-security prisons - tall walls, turrets, guns, barbed wire, bright lights, barriers.
Some Israelis say of their country, "A good country in a bad neighborhood," but clearly, Israel has not been a very good neighbor.
And if you believe the propaganda that Israel is only doing what it has to do to defend itself, note that the IDF has guns, rockets, armor and tanks and seem to be fighting a people armed mostly with rocks and soda cans.
The women in the film are haunted by their personal experiences with power, rage and cruelty - experiences which, as women, are new to them.
One woman, a border policewoman named Libi, talks about her anger when a friend of hers was killed, and how she took it out by tormenting, for hours, a group of 70 or 80 innocent Arabs who were unlucky enough to be crossing a border when she was in charge.
"I stood them in a line and decided that they would stay with me for the whole 12- to 14-hour shift, in the sun, in the heat," she says. "I made them stand there with me and had them do all kinds of exercises."
A few years later, we see her playing with her small child. She seems to be happy; so does the infant. But then she turns to the camera and confesses that every now and then, even when she is with her baby, she is consumed by a rage so powerful that she cannot control it. And she talks about "the unbearable lightness of death."
But the deepest scars and the most depressing story come from Meytal, a woman whose face is so young and fresh that it makes you think of strawberries.
She chose to be a medic to save lives and be where the action is.
Yet in one of her tales, she is assigned to wash a decaying corpse so that the Palestinians, when they get it back, will not be able to tell that it bled to death.
But the worst comes later. She can hardly believe it herself as she talks. One day she encounters an Arab corpse with an erection. She is amused. She squats next to it and asks a colleague to take her picture.
Then she tries to erase what she did from her mind. Thanks to Yarom, who must have tracked down the friend, a few years later Meytal, "To see if I'm smiling," confronts - on camera - the photo.
And, of course, she cries.
I am a firm supporter of Israel and it's right to exist and thrive. But I hate what it has become. The borders haunt me.
Think and Discuss: When we, as Jews, said "Never again," didn't we mean that genocide would never happen again? Or is it only genocide against us?
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