Z32
ISRAEL, FRANCE / 2008 / Hebrew / Color / 35mm (1:1.85) / 85 min
Director, Script, Editing: Avi Mograbi
Co-writer, Music: Noam Enbar
Photography: Philippe Bellaïche
Special Effects Supervisor: Avi Mussel
Special Effects: Eran Feller
Sound Editing and Mix: Dominique Vieillard
Producers: Serge Lalou, Avi Mograbi
Production Company: Les films d’ici
World Sales: Doc & Film International www.docandfilm.com
A former soldier involved in the killing of two Palestinian police by the Israeli military. Alternating scenes of the ex-soldier testifying to the camera as he and his lover sit together, with footage of the director singing his own songs about the incident, the film raises questions of Israeli identity. The masks and image manipulation used to conceal the faces of the ex-soldier and his lover give the film an ominous character.
[Director’s Statement] Z32 deals with the unbearable gap between a young person’s disturbing testimony of his own experience as an elite soldier in the Israeli army and the artistic representation of the very same testimony, the unbridgeable void between a heartless reality and its transmission as a work of art, how artifacts cannot become political actions, and the cynicism of making beautiful art from the atrocities of life.
Avi Mograbi
Born in Israel in 1956, Mograbi is a filmmaker and video artist. Between 1979 and 1982 he studied philosophy at Tel Aviv University and art at the Ramat Hasharon Art School. After 1982 he worked as a first assistant director on local and foreign feature films and TV commercials. He directed his first film, Deportation, in 1989. How I Learned to Overcome My Fear and Love Arik Sharon (1997), Happy Birthday, Mr. Mograbi (1999; Runner-up Prize in the International Competition at YIDFF ’99), August (2002), and Detail (2004) screened at the Berlin International Film Festival. Avenge But One of My Two Eyes (2005) screened at the Cannes Film Festival. Other films include The Reconstruction (1994), Relief (1999), Will You Please Stop Bothering Me and My Family (2000), At the Back (2000), Wait, It’s the Soldiers, I’ll Hang Up Now (2002), and Mrs. Goldstein (2006). |
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