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THIS WEEK'S TRIBUNE
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Kibbutz film poignant, richly researched |
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Written by Barbara Shainbaum
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Thursday, 20 September 2007 |
TORONTO – Israeli director Ran Tal’s poignant, richly researched, and archival documentary Children Of The Sun focusses on the Israeli kibbutz movement in the early 20th century. This kibbutzim experiment in collective living, was full of idealistic Zionist men and women trying to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine by creating utopian communities where everything, even the children, were shared.
The film delves into the experiences of this unique generation of children who were expected to grow into a new type of human being – children of the sun.
“Growing up completely outside the traditional nuclear family structure, they were taught to subjugate the will of the individual in favour of the common good,” explained Tal, who was in Toronto with his film at the recent Toronto International Film Festival (Sept. 6-15). “But these children of the Zionist elite did not choose their parents revolution – they were born into it.”
Children Of The Sun explores the era’s ideals, failures and legacy as it interweaves archival home movies, children’s songs, other rare recordings of kibbutz life from 1930-1980, as well as poignant interviews with the now-grown Children of the Sun, some of his family members and their friends. This personal and public collage reveals both the joys and wounds this generation (mainly in their 60s) bears, even today.
The director’s grandfathers from both sides of his family, one from Russia and the other from Germany, were part of the kibbutz movement. His parents, born in a kibbutz in the late 1920s, were the first generation of The Children of the Sun.
“They were children of the sun in bright Israel as opposed to children of the yeshivas in grey Europe,” Tal pointed out. “Also these metaphoric children of Joseph Stalin, Sun of the Nations, were the fruits of the socialist revolution and the elite of the Zionist movement of their time.”
All of Tal’s history and identity is part of the Kibbutz movement. He was born in Kibbutz Beiet Hashita in 1963 in Northern Israel. However, he chose to tell his film’s story of the kibbutz through the eyes of his parents’ generation, “a disciplined and forgotten generation, who were born into the revolution, served the ideal as much as they could, and finally experienced the collapse.”
The filmmaker chose not to use his personal experiences in the film. He explained that “when I had my children, I tried to understand my childhood and make it more attractive to myself by doing it through my parents’ and uncles’ eyes because it was less ‘I,’ less personal, something I don’t like. It was more radical in those days than in my childhood in the ’60s and ’70s. Most of my generation has left the kibbutz. My parents’ generation has had the whole cycle of life there on the kibbutz. They were born there, some of them will die there, or they’re old people there now.”
Tal says there has been an ongoing discourse, in recent years, about kibbutz life in Israel.
“There used to be propaganda that the kibbutzim were heaven, the best place in the world to grow up. In the last 15 to 20 years, it’s changed to the other side. It’s now kibbutzim were hell. Like the movie, Sweet Mud (a family drama that exposed the dark side of kibbutz life shown at last year’s TIFF and discussed in the Jewish Tribune).”
There have also been art exhibitions in Israel about the kibbutz’s dark side and its issues. Tal feels there have been some hysterical discussions about the kibbutz.
“I tried to make my film a little bit different, by not taking a big stance that it’s good or bad. I tried to understand because it’s like family: you can love your family and you can hate them. Sometimes you want to get away, sometimes you want to get close. The relationship is so complicated. I don’t hide painful scenes in the film, but the scenes, I hope, come from a place of love and compassion. So for my film, I wanted a more balanced approach and tone because of what is happening around the kibbutz. I tried to go to the most intimate place, the family.”
Tal says his film is mainly about the memory of something that no longer exists.
“It was my choice not to film anything new, but to use only archive materials, spanning 60 years of home-movies that I collected from disintegrating archives, and through them to tell the story of my private family, as well as the story of the larger family of the kibbutz.” |
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 25 September 2007 )
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