Film Review: Ahed's Knee (2021) Dir. Nadav Lapid
Courtesy of Les Films du Bal and UNIFRANCE
Written by Belle McIntyre
Courtesy of Les Films du Bal and UNIFRANCE
The title is based on an actual incident between a 16-year old Palestinian activist named Ahed Tamimi and two armed Israeli soldiers during a protest in the West Bank. The video went viral and she was sentenced to eight months in prison. It became a cause célèbre. The protagonist of our film is an Israeli writer-director known as Y (Avshalom Pollak) who is working on a project based on the trials and tribulations of Tamimi.
However, the film is squarely focused on Y, who is in a vulnerable and volatile state of mind as he journeys to a remote desert town in the Arava, where he has been invited to introduce a screening of his latest film followed by a Q & A. It’s a rough journey on a small plane seeming to be headed into wilderness. The mood is enhanced with erratic and jerky camerawork which alternates between extreme inexplicable close ups and swooping vertiginous angles.
Courtesy of Les Films du Bal and UNIFRANCE
Courtesy of Les Films du Bal and UNIFRANCE
He has mixed feelings when he is greeted by Yahalom (Nur Fibak), an attractive and flattering woman from the Ministry of Culture, which is sponsoring his trip. when she informs him that the whole population of the town is 3,000 souls, but not to worry that she has rounded up family and friends to fill the room. Not a very promising start. His discomfort only increases when Yahalom mentions a consent form that he is required to sign agreeing to a narrow list of pre-approved topics. He bridles at this on principle. He is not in alignment with the increasingly authoritarian government
When the screening begins and he slips out to walk in the desert with Yahalom accompanying him he reveals his angst and his anger. His mother, who is his closest collaborator, writer and editor is dying of cancer. His inability to do anything to help her combines with his impotence against the state for its nationalist, racist, sadistic oppression and he launches into an impassioned Shakespearian rant which borders on lunacy and implicates Yahalom as a willing pawn in the whole corrupt system. It is a hair-raising scene and a long one. Y is barely talked off the ledge but he blows everything up for himself and Yahalom. It is an unforgettably intense scene and no one in the theater where I sat moved until the final credits ended. It is a take no prisoners tour de force. Righteous in its convictions, it is not for the faint of heart.
Courtesy of Les Films du Bal and UNIFRANCE
