Film: Kippur (2000)
Yom Kippur (2000)
During the 1973 Yom Kippur War, I was part of a rescue team. For us, the enemy was death : we had to save people. When our helicopter flew over Syrian territory, I saw villages, jeeps and bases, and that's when the missile hit us and our helicopter crashed. From rescuers, we became victims. I had started filming with a small Super 8 camera during the war, but it took me 27 years to be able to make a fiction film about this experience. In 27 years, what was just a personal trauma took on a symbolic dimension. Israel is a strange country : every time you think you've settled your relationship with it, you realize that reality has shifted, that it's in permanent transformation. I'm aware that I'm just one individual inside this great mechanism, perhaps a witness, almost in the Hitchcockian sense of the term : in the sense of witnessing a crime. I won't speak in terms of a mission, but there's something I have to translate through my own eyes. At the same time, Israel is a very touching country, there's something real and direct about it, things are very raw, not camouflaged, rather quite exposed. All this deserves a strong look.
