"In 20 years, when you participate in the 20th Samaria Film Festival and filmmakers from all over the world come here, you can say that you were there when history changed direction and the film revolution in Samaria began."
With these words, Esther Alush opened the first Samaria Film Festival.
There is reason to believe that the festival he initiated and established will indeed make history, otherwise there is no way to explain the reaction of some Israeli filmmakers, who called not only for the boycott of the festival but also for the Rabinovich Foundation - an important fund to support Israeli cinema.
What threatens the esteemed filmmakers that they are considering committing not to take any more money from the Rabinovich Foundation?
After all, to protest the "occupation" is enough to boycott the ceremony.
The answer is anxiety that deeply touches the minds of some of our filmmakers:
Many of Israel's cultural figures are cosmopolitan - Zionism for them was a scaffold (the extremists claiming to be artificial and colonialist), intended solely for the establishment of the State of Israel.
Therefore, once the state is established, it is incumbent on cultural figures to kick the old-fashioned scaffold and push the young state of Israel into the secular and enlightened lap of the West.
The minority that challenges this majority has the opposite approach - the State of Israel is only the means, Zionism is the goal.
The establishment of the state is only a stop in the path of Zionism, whose real purpose is to be a living and developing national home for the Jewish people.
What should a house like this look like?
How is it different, say, from the national home of the American or Mexican?
How is his or my Judaism expressed as a creator?
These are, among other things, questions that fuel the work of cultural figures, whom for the sake of interest we will call those with a "local" consciousness.
Desirable qualities for the artist, such as rebelliousness, criticism and innovation, are becoming more and more common among the "local" cultural figures.
The reason is clear: because for the "cosmopolitan" artist the Western State of Israel is the appearance of everything, he falls in love with its liberal institutions and attributes to them ridiculous nicknames like "gatekeepers".
Such identification with the institutions is a recipe for dormant creation.
The "local" creator, on the other hand, will ask himself how he got with eternity to a situation where the leader is a former bank presenter, and when he speaks in front of graduates of the Field Officers Course in BAD 1 they look at him from the height of their military experience - and here we have an interesting conflict This revolution - the fact that the "local" creator is dealing with more conflicts and therefore his work is more interesting - has been evident in recent years in Israeli music, whose best young composers wear a skullcap or wear a head covering. Artists need institutional financial support, and the presence of representatives of the Rabinovich Foundation at the Samaria Film Festival indicates that funders in the film industry understand that strong conflict and burning creation should start looking not necessarily in Tel Aviv. .
Were we wrong?
Fixed!
If you found an error in the article, we would love for you to share it with us