Fiction sometimes resonates strangely with reality, enough to give you chills. This is the case with Dani Rosenberg’s second feature film, The deserter, chronicle of the flight of a young Israeli soldier, Shlomi (Ido Tako), leaving Gaza for Tel Aviv, in the mad hope of finding his girlfriend and living his life. In competition at Locarno, in August 2023, The Vanishing Soldier (international title) was screened at the Pusan International Film Festival, South Korea, on October 8, 2023, the day after the Hamas attack in Israel.
It was a shock, for the festival-goers and for the filmmaker, to see on the big screen the character on the Gaza border, arriving at the Zikim military base, one of the points through which Hamas entered Israel. , October 7. The director, born in 1979, who lives in Tel Aviv, explains that The deserter was born from his “own anxieties” with regard to the Israeli geopolitical situation.
You were far from your loved ones the day of the Hamas attack. How did you experience the events?
I had just arrived at Pusan airport, October 7, 2023 at midday, I turned on my cell phone and discovered the news. I was in shock. I wanted to go home, but the screening was the next day. During the session with the audience, I told myself that my film was crashing into the wall of reality. A village that we had filmed had just been attacked… I lost my bearings, The deserter described neither the present nor a possible future, I no longer knew in which space it was located.
But the Hamas attack was not 100% a surprise, because we still live on the edge of a volcano, it’s a bit like Pompeii with Vesuvius next to it. We had a sinister feeling that something was going to happen, because there are all these years of colonization of the Palestinian territories behind…
How do we live today in Tel Aviv, so close to Gaza, which has been bombed for six months?
When I returned after the Pusan festival, Tel Aviv, usually so lively, had become a ghost town. And yet, a few weeks have passed, and it’s as if life has taken over, even stronger. There reigns a certain bulimic vitality, like this biblical verse from Saint Paul which says: “Let us eat, let us drink, for tomorrow we will die. » Unconsciously, we realize that we are an hour’s drive from real hell. We may be repressing this reality, and this is leading us to manic-depressive behavior that has always been emblematic of Israeli society.
You have 58.41% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.