Full Description
Against the backdrop of her Zionist grandparents’ sun-drenched home movies from the early days of Israel’s statehood, Elle Flanders paints a starkly contrasting portrait of two unusual couples caught within the current Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Ezra, a Mizrahi Jew, is Israeli; Selim, his gay lover, is Palestinian. Edit and Samira, a lesbian couple, are also negotiating the intricate dance between Jew and Palestinian in today’s charged climate. Facing the burden of bringing their respective tribes to the metaphoric marital bed, these couples rise to the challenge with dignity and profound love.
Flanders, whose passionate central characters provide unique insight into the lives of queer Israelis and Palestinians, also cares deeply about the current state of affairs in Israel. If her interweaving of archival footage evokes an aching nostalgia for a time when Israel represented a place of liberation, it is coupled with Flanders’ awareness that the soil broken by those early immigrants was in dispute. The dissonance between the early family footage, which depicts Jewish American men and women as they optimistically survey the new Jewish State, and the contemporary images of Israeli bulldozers and roadblocks is a beautiful, sad sound that echoes in the mind of the viewer long after the film has ended.
Filmmaker Bio(s)
Ellen Flanders, filmmaker and photographer living in Toronto and New
York, was the Executive Director of Inside Out, the Toronto Lesbian and
Gay Film and Video Festival from 1996 to1999. In 2001 she was the director
of the Persistent Vision Conference celebrating the 25th anniversary of
the San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. Her
filmography includes: SURVIVING MEMORY (short, 1996) Once (short, 2002)
and is currently working on a feature documentary tentatively entitled:
Selim and Ezra; Zero° of Separation.
