"Shoshana" movie trailer/courtesy of Playhouse TLV
Michael Winterbottom is one of the most prolific, talented and versatile British directors of recent decades.
He made films on every conceivable subject: the masterful "Party Men" dealt with the Manchester music scene;
The groundbreaking "Nine Songs" was also about music, but mostly about sex;
The rocking "In This World" followed illegal Afghan immigrants and "By Heart" featured Angelina Jolie as the partner of Daniel Pearl, the Jewish journalist murdered by terrorists in Pakistan.
The list goes on and includes the brand "The Trip", which spawned a TV series and film versions that became a cult.
All along, while he was directing at the rate of one film a year, Winterbottom dreamed of another project: a film about the British Mandate, a subject that his country's cinema hardly dealt with.
The director stated his desire to do this back during his visit to the Jerusalem Festival about a decade ago, but only now is the film creaming skin and sinews and reaching the screens.
After its premiere at the Toronto Film Festival last fall, it will be shown in movie theaters in Israel this weekend, and will later be shown in the rest of the world as well.
The film is called "Shoshana", as the name of its heroine, who, like the other characters in the plot, is based on a woman who really was - Shoshana Borochov, the daughter of the Zionist leader Dov Bar Borochov, who was a journalist and an activist in the Defense Organization, and had an affair with the British officer Thomas Wilkin.
or Rabuar Shoshana.
From "Shoshana"/courtesy of Playhouse TLV
Wilkin takes a conciliatory approach towards the Jewish settlement, but then appoints another British policeman named Geoffrey Morton over him, who initially oppressed the Palestinians and then seeks to do the same to the Jews, and mainly pursues the scalp of the Lehi leader, Avraham Stern ("Yair").
A review published on the Ynet website claimed that the film portrays Stern and the other members of the Lehi as murderous terrorists, paralleling them with Palestinian terrorists today and proving that we are "a people virtuous only in our own eyes."
On the other hand, a pro-Palestinian observer wrote on the popular international website Tarbox that "Shoshana" is nothing less than "Zionist rubbish, which erases the Palestinians from the history of the region".
Here is another proof that cinema is a Rorschach test, to which everyone responds according to the position and the clickbait that suits them.
"I don't like movies that tell you who is good and who is bad and tell you how to feel," Winterbottom responds to this in a special interview with Walla!
Culture, which takes place in Zoom.
"In a nutshell, I can only comment on one thing. A lot of people ask, 'Where are the Palestinians?' So they don't. The film doesn't pretend to be a history lesson, and it didn't focus on how Israel was born."
I guess it was clear to you that a film on such a subject would generate heated reactions.
Why did you want to deal with such an explosive topic in the first place?
"Basically, there is something in me that I really like to do, I've always liked to make films that other people don't like to do. This is true for most of my career, but it's not necessarily true this time. I didn't want to do it. The simple motivation: I read fascinating historical materials, for example Tom Segev's books, and I was interested in researching the period when Britain was the occupying power in Palestine. It's an interesting period, not enough is known about it and it was hardly represented in cinema."
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There are arguments online as to whether the film is more anti-Israeli or anti-Palestinian.
Would you agree with me that he is mostly anti-British?
He presents the British as unable to manage the region, losing control and creating a mess.
"The story of the mandate reminds me of the American experience in Iraq. They went in and occupied a country but they had no policy about what to do with it. When you read documents about the internal discussions of the British administrator, you see that they had no idea what to do."
"The British oppressed both the Palestinians and the Jews. This is how it is: usually, an occupying power oppresses the local residents. The film shows how the British use 'waterboarding' to torture the Lehi activist Binyamin Zaroni.
This is not my invention.
This is based on historical evidence, including that of British officers themselves.
I think we should take a step back and ask - by what right did the British think they were allowed to redistribute the Middle East, and why in the first place did some colonialist power think they had the right to conquer and rule?".
"By what right did the British think they were allowed to redistribute the Middle East, and why in the first place did some colonialist power think it had the right to conquer and rule?".
From "Shoshana"/courtesy of Playhouse TLV
At the start of work on the project, Colin Firth was supposed to star alongside Matthew McFadyen.
In the end, "Shoshana" settles for less glamorous names, although respectable.
Uri Albi plays Stern, whose role in the plot is more minor than was initially announced, and the Israeli team also includes Ofer Sekar (who was the editor of this section!).
Wilkin is played by Douglas Booth and the bad cop, Morton, is played by Harry Melling, who played Dudley Dursley in the "Harry Potter" films.
Shoshana is played by a Russian actress, Irina Stresenbaum.
"Israelis today do not look like those who lived here in the 1930s. They were all in the army, and look different," explains the British director.
"At the time, most of the Jews in the settlement were Eastern European immigrants, so it made sense to choose a Russian actress for the role. Tel Aviv doesn't look the same today as it did in the 1930s, so we filmed in southern Italy, which is more like the Tel Aviv of the past. The Tel Aviv actors were impressed and convinced by the imagery, And I hope the audience in Israel will feel the same way."
As fate would have it, the British premiere of the film took place on the seventh of October.
"I was in London with the Israeli actors, they were busy on the phones and just starting to digest what happened. It was a terrible horror," says Winterbottom, without a particular desire to go into detail beyond that or to get into contemporary politics, so I continue with some questions about cinema.
You like to shoot in natural light and with few takes.
Did you do the same this time?
"I usually try to shoot in a simple and loose style. I introduce characters and stories into a world that already exists and don't try to control it. This time it was more difficult, because 'Shoshana' is a period film, and I had to make it look like it was in the thirties. This placed limitations that made it difficult for me , and required me to be closer to the script than usual."
Uri Albi as Abraham Stern ("Yair") in Shoshana/courtesy of Playhouse TLV
You made "Party People", one of the best movies about music, so I have to ask how you worked on the music in "Shoshana".
"Music is difficult. It is one of the things that most affects your film, and you only start working on it at the end of production, and can only hope that it will work. Tel Aviv of the 1930s was a modern, young and vibrant city, so I wanted music to be like that. I didn't want anachronistic music , so I didn't use songs that came out after the 1930s. The challenge was to find music from that period that would feel modern and fresh."
I've always said that if asked to take one movie to a desert island, I'd take The Party People.
Is this movie as important to you as it is to me, and to many other people I know?
"It was fun to make. What I loved about the world he describes is the chaotic nature of it. The Manchester music scene of those days was the opposite of the corporate business world. It was a mess, and we let people do what they wanted, and still great things came out of it. It was The spirit of the film, and also the experience of filming was like that."
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