Left-A Movie

As part of the Re-U-Man project, I am trying to reexamine the political "I" that sits in the diagram under the title Kingdom. For that, I had to go back to my homeland. I chose to meet with the Arab citizens of Israel, who so patiently and problematically have lived as the others among us, who have been left out of the discourse of the shaping of the Jewish state, who live in exile in their own land. The director Shimon Azuly and I met with the new leadership of the Arabs as well as the leadership of the Jewish left, in which our own political views had been formed.

We chose the time of the election, when political truths flare up onto the surface. The movie concentrates on the geneology of the zionist, socialist, communist, religious and humanist ideologies in a time of crisis and how they appear with all their power in the high energy moment of election. We went to political rallies was as well as personal meetings, hearing the layers of consistency. Although the Arab and Jewish leaderships may want to excape from old ideologies, they are trapped in their power fields.

LEFT does not propose to offer solutions. It tries to understand which kind of discourse we should develop in order to make Israel a state for all its citizens. How can we reinvent our history, rife with meanings, mythologies and meta-mythologies, in order to offer a better future.

The movie ends on the night of the election. Because of the outcome, the rise of the Right wing Israel, we decide to continue shooting a second part in two months time. We want to examine how the people we met will respond to the new situation and how ther are going to rethink their positions.