Film : The Last Day of Yitzhak Rabin (2015), fiction
When Rabin was assassinated on November 4 1995, I felt that a page in modern Israeli history had been turned. I've always felt that this part of the world is... like a volcano. On a global scale, it's not the most important conflict : in the last two years, more people have died in Syria than in a hundred years of Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But it does have great symbolic power, for a number of reasons. Firstly, it is truly a collision between a Westernized society and the East. This small territory is also the birthplace of the three monotheistic religions : Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Taken together, these three religions radiate a very strong imagery across the entire planet, despite the fact that the distance between the sea and the Jordan River is less than a hundred kilometers ! So, this small territory has a very strong symbolic value.
In this context, the problem for artists, filmmakers and writers is what to do when you live near a volcano. What artistic form can propose? What's the right distance ? This means that, since we're in the middle of a very dramatic situation, a sort of uninterrupted soap opera, we have to impose a perspective, and that's not easy. So a few years ago, we decided to do this project on Rabin's assassination as a kind of gesture of remembrance, and even with the hope that, sometimes, when you resurrect memory, it can get things moving. But we must remain modest : art is not the most effective means of changing reality. Politics or machine guns have a much more direct effect. But sometimes art acts as a delaying tactic, preserving the memory that those in power would like to erase, because they call for obedience and don't want to be disturbed, they don't want dissent. If artists remain true to their inner truth, they produce work that travels through time, even if it doesn't have an immediate impact. I hope that's what we're doing with this multi-faceted presentation : a film, exhibitions and a play about the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.
