“Ahed’s Knee”, the ghosts of the desert by Nadav Lapid

OFFICIAL SELECTION – IN COMPETITION

A pale sky, filmed from a lightning-fast motorbike. Soon, the lampposts streak the landscape like musical notes embarked on a mad race. The pleasure of speed and punk dazzling foreground, in the vein of filmmaker and poet FJ Ossang: on the second day of the Cannes competition, Wednesday July 7, we come out dazzled, and breathless, at the screening of the fourth feature -movie by Nadav Lapid, Ahed’s Knee. Film after film – The policeman (2011), The teacher (2014), then Synonyms who received the Golden Bear in Berlin, in 2019 -, the Israeli filmmaker, aged 46, keeps his experimental gesture intact while constantly seeking to make a visual beauty vibrate, never aestheticizing, in harmony and in movement with his a look of rare darkness.

Read the portrait: Nadav Lapid, cinema for homeland

If, in a few years, the director, former sports journalist, photographer and author, conquered the hearts of cinephiles, it is because he succeeded in revisiting Jean-Luc Godard or Eric Rohmer while making the showdown with his enemies. interiors: through his characters, some of whom are alter egos, the filmmaker never ceases to denounce the Israeli political situation. So much so that he is about to leave his own country and settle in France with his family – he has already lived in Paris in the past.

Read also: Nadav Lapid, Israeli jack-of-all-trades, no longer believes in the “normality” of a “blind” country

With Ahed’s Knee, a nod to the Claire’s knee (1970), by Eric Rohmer, Nadav Lapid plants a double flag, cinematographic and territorial. Ahed does not come from the same world as the Rohmerian heroine: she echoes the teenage girl Ahed Tamimi, who has become an icon of the Palestinian resistance for her numerous actions against Israeli settlers and soldiers, near her town of Nabi Saleh, in north of Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank. In December 2017, after slapping an Israeli soldier, she was taken away, handcuffed and jailed for several months. In Israel, the deputy Bezalel Smotrich had, at the time, expressed on Twitter his regret that the young girl did not take a bullet in the kneecap, in order to make her disabled for life. This news feeds the beginning of the story, while Y., filmmaker (Avshalom Pollak), is working on a fiction based on Ahed’s story.

Plastic inventiveness

This film which plunges into the abyss is also inspired by the experience of the director. In 2018, Nadav Lapid received a call from a library director, offering to come and present his film The teacher in Sapir, a small remote village, in the desert region of Arava. Over the course of the discussion, the filmmaker learns that he must first make a commitment not to broach certain sensitive subjects with the spectators. Anything that is likely to disturb the authorities will not be admitted. Very transparent, the civil servant of the Ministry of Culture expresses her disagreement with these new directives, while acknowledging that she applies them without qualms. At the time, Nadav Lapid had accepted the contract.

You have 48.26% of this article to read. The rest is for subscribers only.