CANNES:
Writer director Eran Kolirin has been known for his television
dramas and TV shows that he has directed in Israel. Here he
tells us what drove him to make The Band's Visit. Excerpts:
 |
| Eran
Kolirin |
When
I was a kid, my family and I used to watch Egyptian movies.
This was a fairly common Israeli family practice, circa the
early 1980s. In the late afternoon on Fridays, we would watch
with bated breath the convoluted plots, the impossible loves
and the heartbreaking pain of Omar Sharif, Pathen Hamama,
l'del Hamam, and the rest of the crew on the one and only
channel that the country had. This was actually weird for
a country that spent half of its existence in a state of war
with Egypt, and the other half of it in a sort of cold correct
peace with its neighbour to its south.
Sometimes,
after the Arab movies, they would broadcast a performance
of the Israeli Broadcasting Authority's orchestra. This was
a classical Arab orchestra, made up almost entirely of Arab
Jews from Iraq and Egypt. When you think of the IBA orchestra,
maybe the custom of watching Egyptian movies sounds a little
less odd.
The
Arab movie has long since disappeared from our screens. TV
became privatized and has sunk out there among the 557 or
who knows how many channels that have descended upon us.
And
then the IBA orchestra was disbanded. We got MTV, BBC and
RTL and Israeli Idol and pop songs and 30-second commercials.
So who cares about the quartertone songs that last for half
an hour anymore?
Afterwards,
Israel built this new airport and they forgot to translate
the road signs into Arabic. Among the thousands of shops they
built there, they found no room for the strange, curling script,
which is the mother tongue of half our population.
It's
easy to forget the things that H&M, Pull and Bear and
Levis etc make us forget. Over time, we have forgotten ourselves
too.
A
lot of movies have been made touching on the questions of
why there is no peace, but it seems that fewer have been made
about why we need peace in the first place. The obvious is
lost on us in the midst of our conversations centering on
economic advantages and interests. At the end of the day,
my son and my neighbour's son will meet. I am sure of that,
in some neon-blinking mall under a giant McDonald's sign.
Maybe that's some kind of comfort, I don't know. What's certain
though is that we have lost something along the way. We traded
true love for one-night stands, art for commerce, and the
human connection, the magic of conversation for the question
of how big a slice of the pie we can put our hands on.
|
