Documentary as metaphor. House and Wadi, two documentary trilogies filmed over a quarter of a century; Pineapple

Films : House (1980) ; News from Home/News from House (2005) ; Pineapple (1983). Documentaries

" House and Wadi are two films for which I felt the need to return, several years later, to the same locations to film the same people. For me, Wadi is a kind of archaeological site, with each character representing a particular layer of human archaeology. In fact, for me, each film is like a new chapter in a chronicle : I record different states of the territory like so many archaeological layers, because Israel still sees itself as a state without history, which expends superhuman efforts to excavate a small piece of wall from Solomon's time and raze entire neighborhoods. We're still in the abstraction of the Zionist period. With House and Wadi, what interested me was to record, through these films shot several years apart, human transformations within the same site.
For Ananas, it all started with a label. One day, while opening my fridge, I looked closely at a can of pineapple ; it had been made in the Philippines, boxed in Honolulu, distributed in San Francisco, and the label " printed in Japan ". It was a concrete illustration of multinational economics. Pineapple is a bit like House : a microcosm .

House (1980)

House traces the changing ownership and occupancy of a house in West Jerusalem. After the departure of its owner, a Palestinian doctor, in 1948, the house was requisitioned by the government under the " absentee law ", rented to an Algerian Jewish couple, then bought by an Israeli university professor who set about transforming it. The former residents, the workers, the new owner and the neighbors all join in the construction. The film was censored by Israeli television.

News from Home News from House (2005)

In News from Home News from House, the juxtaposition of stories and memories replaces the site filmed in 1980 and again in 1997. The space has become a mental space. The place has decomposed into a microcosm preparing for exile, whether internal or external. We are witnessing the creation of a new Palestinian identity, a diasporic identity.

Pineapple (1984)

" [In Pineapple], Amos Gitai's strategy is neither to ridicule nor to sanction his subjects. Rather, he attempts to undermine the viewer's confidence in the transparency of what is said and seen. He encourages us to look at what they represent rather than judge what they are. As a result, the interviews themselves, more than the individuals, appear as symptoms of the West's unequal and complex relationship with the Third World. " (David Lusted, Framework, n° 29, 1985)