The few intensive days of the 25th #CoPro in Tel Aviv, filled with panel discussions, project presentations, and meetings, end with the screenings of the recently completed, brand-new films included in the Rough Cuts and Screening Room strands. «CoPro is always looking for ways to expand our activity and contribute to the industry on a larger scale», – comments Pnina Halfon Lang. «We recently launched our new Impact Lab and created a pilot to train both filmmakers and potential impact producers on how to use films to catalyse positive change. Furthermore, we are developing the distribution field and upgrading our screening platform for professionals, which will be called from now on CoPro.Screen.»
Several high-profile productions have already confirmed international premiere dates among the complete titles. A moving and at times beautifully poetic The Return From the Other Planet by Asaf Lapid, to be premiered soon at the Filmfest Munchen, features a literary work of the major Israeli author – Ka.tzetnik 135633 – whose books were crucial in shaping the nation’s early experience of the #Holocaust. Ka.tzetnik, or Yehiel De-Nur, a survivor of #Auschwitz, for decades after the war, struggled with the effects of the deep trauma of the concentration camp. In the late 70s, he decided to undergo experimental psychotherapy with the use of #LSD. He recorded the sessions in his last work, The Code, which brings a humanistic overturn of his earlier notion of Auschwitz as «the other planet» with its own set of rules, roles, language, and laws.
Ka.tzetnik’s final reflections gravitate toward the famous Hannah Arendt’s observation of the «banality of evil», and this is also a stance taken by #Gitta Sereny#, an Austrian-British journalist who in the 1970s interviewed #Nazi perpetrators like Franz Stangl – the commandant of the killing centres in the #Sobibor and #Treblinka concentration camps, or the child murderers like Mary Bell in the UK. Her work is presented in Tamara Erde’s After the Evil. Besides the introduction to Gitta Sereny’s interviews and her insistence on perceiving a responsibility of an individual in connection with social and historical circumstances that gave rise to evil behaviour, the film displays the enormous cost one has to pay for going into the darkest corners of the human mind, even just for the sake of understanding.
The notion of a decisive role of social circumstances is, however, dismissed by the character in Limor Pinhasov’s, at times chilling and bloodcurdling My Project X. Michal, herself a victim of her stepfather, the notorious Israeli murderer #Motke Kedar#, for years was interviewing the most psychopathic murderers in the US, like #Charles Manson#, and #Richard Ramirez# in an attempt to cope with her #trauma. The snippets of these prison conversations compose the backbone of the search for meaning, for true reasons behind their actions, and the roots of their astonishing integrity. In one of his final passages, Richard Ramirez says: «This is a wicked world… and in a wicked world, wicked people are born, you know?» this seems to be the final justification of the perpetrators. The victims give them, however, no right to escape responsibility with such observations.
Yet, all too often, the victims can tell their stories years after the crimes were committed. Especially if the crimes take place within a family or «extended» family, as in the case of the gripping yet truly hair-raising picture of a contemporary form a patriarchal order can incorporate in In the Name of the Father by Bat dor Ojalvo and Gal Goffer. A big international coproduction, the film presents the large Brooklyn-based Jewish Orthodox community established by Rabbi Schick («Mohorosh») and the dramatic fight for inheritance that started after his death. Around 30,000 followers, hundreds of families living both in the US and #Israel, and the charismatic Rabbi who guided every aspect of their lives for four decades completely overshadow the dangers of a cohesive group built on a fusion of religion and unrestricted power. Far from the official meetings and the lights of a day looms another dark side of constructing a functioning social group – a need for and means of keeping law and order and enforcing obedience to a patriarch.
Such traditional, patriarchal borders are inexistent in another snapshot of contemporary reality: Sapir by Liran Atzamor. Sapir Berman is undergoing a process of gender change but also wants to keep her previous position as the professional-league soccer referee. She dreams of becoming the first-ever #transgender soccer referee in the world and finds numerous supporters in this way, including her family, friends, and the soccer referees’ professional organisation. With the ongoing hormonal therapy, her body starts changing, and she realises her expectations may also have to change.
The fascinating discussion on the current times unfolds, however, in the smoothly told, captivating Silver’s Uprising by Dan Shadur. Amos Dov Silver seems to symbolize the complexity of the repressed part of society. A son of an Orthodox Jewish family, educated in law, a former soldier with traumatic experiences from the army, who went through an equally traumatic encounter with a psychiatric hospital’s enforced medicalisation, he found, similarly to tens of thousands of other people with #PTSD, a solace in #marijuana (illegal in Israel). With time, he had to escape due to piling-up problems with the law. He went to the US, from where he started connecting marihuana dealers with clients in Israel. That was the beginning of the infamous drug-dealing mobile app Telegrass, which gradually evolved into a full-fledged, professional organisation that completely changed the drug-dealing scene in Israel. Hugely popular among the traumatized, former military Israeli youth, Amos Dov Silver is a hero for those in need and a dangerous, subversive, and inflammatory figure for those in power.
The 25th CoPro took place between June 5th-8th, and the complete films will be available on the CoPro.Screen platform throughout the year.
