Power Zvika ("Power Zvika" courtesy of yes Docu and STINGTV, No Drama studio Productions, directed by Shai Lahav)
While documentary filmmaking is often (wrongly) seen as a serious, dry genre, docu-music films are the official refresher of any film festival. When well made, such a film can serve as a particularly effective business card that generates new fans years ahead for the subjects of the documentation. This is what makes this particular subgenre also vulnerable - PR interest can make the work almost a promotional film, free of low moments or the more complex and problematic sides of that musician or band.
"Days of the Pick" (later Bis Docu), which tells the life story of musician and icon Zvika Pick, does not fall into this trap. Just ask Yizhar Cohen, who, according to the filmmakers, burst into the film's premiere to declare that in his eyes an "injustice has been done" to the artist who passed away last summer. It's not known exactly what part of the film Cohen was referring to, but it's easy to understand why he felt that way - the film tells a story that has a lot of missed opportunity and pain. Shai Lahav and Ron Omer's film documents Pick's career from its first moments until his tragic death about a year ago, and often focuses on the aspects revealed about Pick's character in the lower moments of his career.
The film includes Pick's last interview, filmed three months before his death, along with archival materials and conversations with people who knew and worked alongside Pick over the years, or commentators such as Kobi Oz, Shai Kerem (who recently conquered the screen himself in "Dana Kama") or Yoav Kutner. All these build a character full of contradictions and layers: a workaholic who has trouble maintaining social relationships, a flirty who knows and loves to charm women, a pioneering pop star who always thought about the next step but also found it difficult to adapt to the changes of the times, the representative of outsiders who celebrated everything that was flashy and exaggerated but also took pride in his studies at the conservatory and dreamed of being appreciated as a "serious" musician.
A character full of contradictions and layers. From "Pick Days" (Photo: Gabriel Bharalia)
Other creators might have chosen to devote most of their screen time to successes and achievements, but the goal of Pick Days is to decipher not only Pick's character as a creator and person, but as a phenomenon. And when you talk about Pick as a cultural phenomenon, it's hard to ignore the elephant in the room—the long depression period in which Pick was considered a buzz-bin and even a joke. In some ways, the film teaches us more about Peake's unique personality through his failures and years of drought. Participants repeatedly praise Pick's talent and courage and build an aura of a groundbreaking underdog around him, but they don't hide his other sides either, from the cases in which he avoided paying those who collaborated with him to those in which he found it difficult to share the spotlight with others. For example, Kerem mentions the fact that after Dana International's victory in the Eurovision Song Contest with the song he composed, Pick claimed that the song would have won his performance. Karam reminded him that the song had indeed won, and Pick insisted "but with more score".
The choice to deal with this "difficulty" precisely by diving into it and delving into its causes and consequences is admirable, because a fascinating and important character like Zvika Pick deserves a film that will fully contain this character. He does all this without moralism or morality, even without rosy fantasies about how "sometimes dreams come true." It's unpleasant and for moments it hurts, but it's also the truth.
"Amos's Rebellion" (later in Bis Docu) is also a portrait of a charismatic figure who experienced highs and lows, only this time it is not a groundbreaking musician but a completely different kind of pioneer - Telegrass founder Amos Dov Silver. Dan Shador's film ("Before the Revolution," "King Bibi") does not choose the fashionable hetero-cream angle, nor does it focus on the rise and fall of the community that connected dealers and cannabis consumers via Telegram, but chooses to turn Telegrass into another chapter of the life of the man behind it. A long, meaningful and influential chapter, but still only part of a larger story about a born leader and a man of great talent, whose actions were largely dictated by his rejection and rage at the establishment and those in power, whoever they may be.
Effective, even too effective. From "Amos's Rebellion" (Photo: Kristina Lizgov)
The film begins with Silver's high-profile arrest in March 2019 in Kyiv, which took place at the symbolic 4:20 a.m. From there on, we return to his adolescence in a religious family and yeshiva, continue with him to leave religion and enlist in the IDF, experience with him the horror of involuntary hospitalization and see him become a prominent and influential figure in the struggle for the legalization of cannabis in Israel. One of the most striking features of "Rebellion" is its use of animation — in a sense it's a constraint — a substitute for a filmed interview — that gives a visual side to the conversation in which Silver tells his story to the creators, but there is also another side to it. Watching Silver's cartoon character, from child to teenager to adulthood, creates real identification and intimacy with the film's protagonist. Add to that the praise and praise of his friends, former colleagues at Telegrass, and especially the rabbi who taught him at the yeshiva – who described him as the kind of outstanding student who became the "arbiter of the generation." What did you get?
"Amos's Rebellion" isn't a movie that endorses its hero completely, but for moments it surrenders itself to the magic that made so many people perceive Silver as something between Robin Hood and Christ. It's effective, sometimes even too effective, because when we start hearing about threats he sent to a journalist or to the one-man government he led at Telegrass, it's too little too late. Again and again we hear about the importance of Tallgrass, the revolution it led and the surprising developments derived from it, while broad and intriguing questions about how it operated or its situation today are not entirely deciphered. It's still a successful film that anyone who was even a little interested in the affair would find interesting, but the choice to focus on one character slightly limits his ability to describe the phenomenon completely.
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Terrible traumas, different tactics
In the 1980s, Michal Ben-Horin wandered between prisons in the United States to meet the most feared and intriguing people in the world - famous serial killers such as Charles Manson and "The Knight Stoker" Richard Ramirez. Their atrocities were well covered on ominous news broadcasts, turning them into real-life cheesebets, a dark equivalent of cultural heroes. In the film "Prisoner X" directed by Limor Pinchasov (later Bis Docu), Ben-Horin rewatches the interviews she filmed with these threatening psychopaths, with her personal story mixed with their deceptive characters and the life story of the person who changed her life forever - her stepfather Motke Kedar, better known as "Prisoner X", an Israeli intelligence operative imprisoned for murder, and as the summary says, in the eyes of the daughter is "the man who hurt her, And the greatest psychopath of all."
Pinchasov's use of editing and connecting timelines, characters and conflicting feelings is no less than brilliant, and gives depth and strength to the story of a free man that transcends any chronological description. Much of the power of the film comes from its heroine - a brilliant, sensitive and one-of-a-kind woman, who describes a life story that is at once unimaginable and completely relatable. There is nothing obvious about the choices she makes, but she tells about them in a way that makes it very difficult for the viewer not to understand her. Even when she does the wrong thing, it's perfectly clear to us why he felt like the obvious decision at that moment.
Nothing short of brilliant. "Prisoner X" (Photo: DocAviv)
The desire to decipher what goes through the mind of a psychopathic serial killer has yielded countless works, even entire genres. Still, the angle of "Prisoner X" is as unique as it is fascinating. Ben-Horin is not a detective or an FBI agent, nor is she the daughter of a murder victim seeking revenge, but a "rank-and-file" woman who has found herself repeatedly drawn to the darkest places of the human psyche. She doesn't grant any of her interviewees a pardon or an exemption from responsibility, but she does look bravely at the pain that shaped them. Kedar's presence in her life robbed her of her childhood and innocence, and not only did she refuse to give up her own life - she insisted on trying to understand, to explain to herself how such monsters are born, and where their humanity begins and ends.
Actress Nur Pivak takes a completely different approach to a similar subject in the film she directed, in which she also plays herself - "the lowest bar" (later in Bis Docu). Pivak recruited a cast of actors and actresses, set up a table in front of the cameras and staged a reenactment of the legal proceedings against the man who sexually abused her when she was just nine years old. Most of the time, the picture we see is minimalist: people sit around a table and read, as if rehearsing for a movie, the real transcripts from the courtroom.
Sometimes the story is interspersed with investigative materials and evidence – pages from Pibeck's diary, photographs from her youth or a police confrontation – alongside childhood drawings that come to life during particularly difficult moments. In one shocking scene, the cinematic language also changes, and from reading a script we move on to an "ordinary" scene in which Pevak recreates a moment that was undoubtedly one of the most difficult and demanding she has ever experienced. All these additions enrich the film and present the original and clear voice of Pivak as a creator, but the truth is that even the long and agonizing scenes around the table manage to captivate the viewer to the screen as they are.
Terrifying, heartbreaking and, at times, funny. From "The Lowest Bar" (Photo: Assaf Amir)
How does this happen? Very simple - excellent acting by the cast and the script they received, a text so extreme that it simply cannot be invented. The defense lawyer (played by Idit Toperson) accuses Pivak of fabricating child abuse to cope with financial hardship, and despite repeatedly being asked to treat the complainant with basic respect, she continues to try to frame her as a liar, manipulative or just a "problem girl." The encounter between this sensitive issue and the cold legal lexicon creates amazing moments of absurdity, chief among them a bizarre scene in which the judge and the prosecution on both sides of the conflict discuss for a duration the issue of the average age for fourth graders.
It's a terrifying, heartbreaking and at times funny film that says a lot without dictating to its viewers how to feel and what to think. There is a clear criticism of the court here and a very disturbing "villain" character, but the film allows Pebeck to confront her own demons first and foremost. The result is a hard-to-digest work that touches on issues that are difficult if not impossible to fully reconcile without dodging the most sickening parts of an already volatile situation.
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Tags
- Zvika Pick
- Prisoner X
- Telegrass
- Docaviv