beginning August 18th.) We get blink-and-you-miss-’em shots of the other students who take the hot seat, but it’s merely a courtesy: This is Maia’s movie, and she’s the test subject that will force Alexandrowicz to reckon with his own previously established value systems. A former soldier, the filmmaker has dealt with the Occupation in his other docs, and has clung to the notion that, by exposing viewers to what’s going on, he can win hearts and minds.
That’s not entirely true: Levy is definitely sympathetic to the children she sees being rousted in the middle of the night in Hebron by Israeli soldiers. She can recognize when lines are being crossed. But there are enough tells in her reactions, enough cynicism — possibly earned, probably inherited — in her responses to see which side of the argument she falls on.
Yet Levy never comes off as a caricature, and is never set up to be a straw man for the filmmaker’s arguments. She is never portrayed as a monster, just a human being. She’s your uncle at Thanksgiving dinner and the kid getting righteous during a late-night dorm room hang. She is anyone who’s grown up on a diet of 21st century media, and sees someone behind every curtain, pulling levers and pushing agendas.
Eventually, Alexandrowicz calls her back for a second session some six months later, and asks Levy to re-view the original footage of her talking about the clips. He then frames a monitor of Maia watching herself with the old scenes running in a parallel monitor, as he himself watches in the background. The descent down the meta rabbit hole gets dizzying.
It ends with another conversation between the two of them, and something like a stalemate — yet you can see how far each has gone in fostering some sort of understanding of each other. You also understand thatis ultimately not really about Israel at all, or at least, not solely about the situation in the Middle East. It’s about seeing freedom fighters vs. insurrectionists, a leader vs. a con man, a plague vs. a hoax. It’s about arguing over whose lives matter.
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