There’s an inherent poignance to old 8mm-film footage of people and places long gone, a piecemeal history with meaning mostly to those who recognize the faces in the footage. Director Eliav Lilti and producer Arik Bernstein have taken that fact and spun it into a feature-length documentary about Israel.
The film stretches from immigrants arriving in Palestine in the 1930s to the Camp David Accords in 1978. Much of what we see is mundane — children being bathed, weddings, a beach where the man’s camera seems to find only pretty girls. Because this is the conflict-haunted Middle East, some moments take on sad significance. A few frames of a young man hand-starting a propeller is, it turns out, the one image this family has of him; he died in the 1948 war. Childhood and weddings mix with dark recollections of seeing Holocaust survivors struggle to restart their lives.
It’s narrated by the family members themselves, though their present-day faces are never shown. Moshe Dayan’s son, Udi, mixes ribald jokes with nostalgia for the footloose ’60s and ’70s, but otherwise these are ordinary people.
Arabs are glimpsed in images both benign (a woman fondly recollects her Palestinian nanny) and disturbing (Egyptian POWs from the Six-Day War are abused by the military police). The structure and narration leave vital things outside the frame; when a minaret is destroyed, there’s no way to know who gave the order, or why.
Ultimately, this film reveals the Israeli self-image, but not much more. The people with the cameras pass by Arab neighbors, and what the Palestinians’ home movies might look like remains unexplored.