Reporting from the free zone The news that flashed in the press a few years ago about the fate of an Israeli woman born in Auschwitz and later became the wife of an Arab who gave her eight children, from whom thirty grandchildren were born and, already from them, four great-grandchildren, even in the current conditions looks very exotic. The extraordinary story of Helen Bershetsky, which became public, surprised many, including the prominent Israeli director Amos Gitai. Being a director of a wide profile, who is capable of both documentary and artistic genre, Gitai set out to tell it in his own way and in 2013 brought the picture “Anna Arabia” to the Cannes Festival, which did not remain there without attention and award.
Gitaj as a director, combining an acute need to criticize the abuses of state power in his homeland and a constant interest in the cultural heritage of his country, often resting on extreme points such as orthodox self-denial or ethnic enmity, causes no less contradictory attitude among his compatriots. It is not difficult to understand them - few people can like the aesthetic, but direct touch on the topic of disunity and other manifestations of antagonism soldered to the hearts of people who have been humiliated and insulted by the manifestation of the Arab-Israeli conflict over the long years of its existence.
The plot in Anna Arabia is largely secondary, but very important in terms of time and place. Gitai, represented by a young Israeli journalist Yael, asserts her right to interfere in the process of peaceful coexistence of Arab and Palestinian residents in a free zone somewhere near Jaffa, a suburb of Tel Aviv. Yael came here in the hope of learning about the life of the deceased compatriot and to communicate with her Palestinian husband, who also lives with his own daughter Miriam and the last wife of his deceased son Sarah. Each of these people alternately communicates with the journalist, telling her biographical episodes of his personal life. The nature of their revelations varies in the degree of emotionality and openness, common is only undisguised contempt for politics and the bitterness of irony about their own fates. It is interesting to observe not only them, but also Yael herself, within which mixed feelings clearly struggle throughout the action and gradually the main goal in the form of a cool printed article gives way to sincere curiosity and an attempt to realize the scale of what was seen and heard. At least from the outside it seems that way.
A deceptively strange, godforsaken enclave on the edge of the industrial world is gradually revealed to Yael and the audience with unusual force. The modesty of housing and garden plots, all life contains deeper and more important moments of quiet and peaceful human life. Yesterday’s enemies no longer want to live without happiness and are trying to create it by their own efforts. And their best ally is time, the very time that the people of the Great Land always lack. This is confirmed by the words of one of the residents, saying that they all live for a very long time, so a hundred and fifty years or more.
In an hour or so that the movie lasts, you don't know if it's too much or too little. Everything here seems simple and uncomplicated. Several worlds, biographies, memories, shown without banknotes in the form of lyrical digressions, flashbacks and even editing transitions are absent here. The purposeful documentary image shows private examples of different people and their memories, in fact, are part of the overall socio-cultural history of the Middle East, full of dignity, but far from happy. On the one hand, Gitai shows that even personal things are always public and political. On the other hand, it seeks a balance between reality and metaphor. In a number of his films, the tree is the key symbol. In Ana Arabia, it marks the beginning and end of a separate story, as if reminding us that once everything was common, from the same roots and one land. And all of this makes it really sad.