Last year, a film about Israel’s 1982 Lebanon war, directed by a former IDF soldier who fought in the conflict, was screened at the Cannes Film Festival. The critics’ praise was lavish, but not sufficient for the judges to award Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir the festival’s top honour, the Palme d’Or.
Last weekend, another film about Israel’s 1982 Lebanon war, also directed by a former IDF soldier who fought in the conflict, was screened at the Venice Film Festival. This time however, the judges decided to reward the Israeli offering, giving Samuel Maoz’s Lebanon their top prize, the Golden Lion.
The irony is that Lebanon’s victory came just as a campaign to boycott Israel’s films hit the headlines. Cinematic luminaries such as Ken Loach and Jane Fonda, who are unhappy at Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, are protesting against an event celebrating movie production in Tel Aviv at this week’s Toronto Film Festival.
Maoz, whose film is being screened at the Toronto festival, responded by noting that if Fonda had been on the jury at Venice, Lebanon might not have won its prize. “The point of a film like mine is to open a dialogue, to get people talking to each other about important issues,” he added. “This is something you can’t do if films are boycotted. It makes no sense to boycott art.”
Lebanon itself assiduously avoids political grandstanding, and sets out instead to recreate the experience of being a young and inexperienced soldier facing the realities of war for the first time. Set inside a tank for almost its entire running length, it is claustrophobic, harrowing and extremely powerful.
I wanted to expose war as it is, naked, without all the heroic stuff
Maoz says that it took him around 24 years to make his directorial debut [Lebanon was shot in 2006] because he first needed time to be able to put some emotional distance between himself and his past in order to be able to make the film “as a director, not just as someone who knows everything because he was there”. He has admitted that it has taken that long for him to write the script without being physically sick at the memory of his experience. What has driven him is “a need to unload”, he says. “To expose war as it is, naked, without all the heroic stuff.”
Indeed, Lebanon may well be the least heroic war film ever made. A sign inside the tank reads: “Tanks are made of iron. Men are made of steel”, but there is nothing steely about the four callow crew members who find themselves literally lost soon after crossing the border on the first day of the invasion. They bicker, talk about their dreams of going home, and panic when things go wrong. The first 10 minutes of the film, during which Shmulik (Yoav Donat), the tank’s gunner based on Maoz, hesitates before firing at an oncoming car, resulting in the death of an IDF soldier, were taken directly from life. “I realised I couldn’t think of a better situation that would show the basic conflict,” says Maoz.
Ultimately, that conflict, according to the director, is between a soldier’s conscience and his basic survival instinct. No one wants to kill, he contends, but in war there is no choice.
“Even if you don’t shoot, you will be a killer,” he says, “because your friends will be dead because of you. If you shoot, you are also a killer. It’s a no-way-out situation. Lebanon is a personal feeling, an anti-war feeling, that deals with this horrible dilemma. War imposes a situation in which you have to take a decision: either you look after yourself and protect your own life, or you are moral. There’s no other option.”
He hopes that audiences will watch the film and think they would probably have acted the same way he had to. “It’s not actually a forgiveness for me,” he says, “but it’s maybe a kind of relief, because people will understand my situation.”
Some critics in Israel have expressed the fear that such a blatently anti-war movie will damage support for the IDF. But Maoz points out the Lebanon conflict holds a unique position in Israel’s history.
“More than once I asked myself: ‘What makes the Lebanon war our Vietnam? What makes it different from other wars?’”
Mainly, it was the guerilla nature of the conflict, the fact that unlike the Six-Day and Yom Kippur wars, which “kept to the game rules”, in Lebanon the enemy was often invisible.
“The war took place inside neighbourhoods, and the enemy was very ingenious. You couldn’t see the difference between civilian and soldier.” Tank crews like Maoz’s, moreover, were untrained for urban warfare. “Tanks are supposed to fight tanks in an open area, not in a built-up area.”
To the director’s disgust, a second war broke out in Lebanon in 2006, just as he was trying to make his film. History was repeating itself in the worst possible way. The film-maker was, of course, opposed to the conflict, and describes it as being like watching a goal re-broadcast from a different angle.
“The difference was in my war there was nothing like the same press and television coverage. People knew, I suppose, what the government wanted them to know. This war was like reality television. The best show on television.”
Maoz himself is thinking about looking at his war from a different perspective in his next film, with a true story that shows how the “chaos of war gets out of control and comes to your door”. In stark contrast, he also is working on a black comedy.
“I know that I feel that I can do the first project,” he says, “but, on the other hand, I want to start playing, to start enjoying life.”
And he adds: “Making Lebanon has got me my life back, and that is more precious than any award.”
