Many have crowned Avi Nesher's recently released film "Victory Picture."
The film tells the story of Kibbutz Nitzanim on the eve of the War of Independence, ostensibly, the essence of Israel's story in 1958: a settlement surrounded by enemy troops; soldiers, pioneers, immigration, absorption, heroism. And subplots whose purpose is to sterilize the great, Zionist story, and to stabilize the Israelis in a seemingly "balanced" position.
The film opens with an Arabic monologue by an Egyptian director, a handsome young man, who is supposed to evoke sympathy.
The Egyptian government equipped him with cameras and sent them to the front in order to present a one-dimensional picture of the confrontation between the Israelis and Egypt.
But the young man denies his mission and says, "You see your enemy as an ordinary person."
Their leftist is already known, avant-garde.
In an effort to attract wide audiences, especially from the margins, the filmmakers incorporated coarse and low-key elements, in terms of descent for the sake of ascent.
To this end, women in bras, men in hallucinations, and vulgar curses of soldiers with a wink to the reservists of "Givat Halfon" were presented.
The idea: a focus on the human, "natural" state, because we are all human.
Out of this Marxist folly, the creators sought to present a "good" film, that is, one that undresses the complex reality of its cultural robes, in favor of the naked truth, literally.
The idea of naked truth connects to a central motif of the left for generations - universalization, that is, a constant striving to peel the cultural strata to the limit, to nothingness.
Thus, a connection of love between a Jewish warrior, a handsome kibbutznik, and the young Arab filmmaker is hinted at, since you have nothing more "natural" than cross-border love.
On the other hand, any element that strives for the opposite situation, namely the marking of borders and the tightening of national fortifications, is dismissed as problematic.
Thus, for example, Abba Kovner, the famous partisan, is portrayed in the film in an almost ridiculous way.
The peeling of culture, that is, the truth, creates the impression that everything, Jews and Arabs, are nothing but Hebrew- or Arabic-speaking human beings.
Naked truth.
The scene that seals the film is the one where buds are crushed and conquered.
Its warriors were defeated, or taken prisoner.
The handsome young woman fell in battle and left behind an infant.
Against this background, the creators chose to sign the film through another universal statement by the young Egyptian director: "There is no harder parting than that of a mother."
Walla.
Go tell this to the proud Palestinian mothers about their sons and the martyr culture.
Symmetry at all costs.
Even at the cost of castrating the facts.
The recurring motif in the film is: our existential state, all of us, Jews and Arabs, is the natural, human, universal state.
No wars, no good and bad, no history, no culture.
Worse, wars are a tragedy that often comes to fruition through the manipulations of leaders on the masses.
At a glance, it is possible that the film came out to teach only about its creators and the ancestors of the creators: Kibbutz Nitzanim, which embodies the utopia of the 20th-century Zionist-Socialist left, has disintegrated from its assets.
But the followers of the 21st century redemption and naked truth did not say desperate, and on its ruins stood a new, seemingly progressive utopia: love, anti-war, the abolition of national and gender hierarchies.
This is an empty pretense, as "The Picture of Victory" is nothing but another exhausting pacifist film from the post-Zionist genre with progressive echoes, with a wink to the award-winning members in Europe and America and a kosher stamp.
A film that comes only to convert one hierarchy into another.
But it must be said: in a sense, the "picture of victory" also reflects a failure: the failure of the Zionist majority (left and right) that failed to stand guard and abandoned the arena.
This is also a failure of the creators: in the Yes Planet cinema hall in Zichron Yaacov, which has about 200 seats, only seven spectators were present.
This is a small detail that tells a big story: the story of an elite that enjoys abundant budgets, positions of power and control without Egypt in the field of culture and media, and yet fails the test of trust of the general public.
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