Canadian Israeli filmmaker extraordinaire, Igal Hecht, screened his docu-quest this past week in Tel Aviv. The film played at the Jewish Eye Film fest in Ashkelon and at various locales around the world including the Toronto Film Festival. His newest release is THE FLAG,and friends organized a special showing of it at one of our cozy apartments in central tel aviv. The turnout was fantastic and Igal entertained questions for over an hour afterwards while we munched on homemade pecan squares and whole wheat fig cookies.
The idea behind the film was to take a provocative look at how the israeli flag is seen by various demographics. Igal travelled through Israel to get differing and emotive perspectives from everyone from the druze community to anti-zionists in mea shearim ( he was chased out...and gave me my first glimpse of Igal actually expressing anger outwardly. He's probably among the gentlest of people that I know. ) It was a ton of fun and I had brought a bunch of friends along with me to support Igal with the film that he had injected so much of himself into.
His personal perspective is almost aligned with mine in that he believes in preservation of the state but also in universal human rights and freedoms. Many people believe that these exist in mutual exclusivity when it comes to Israel, I'm not of that opinion. I'm also not much of an apologist for the state of Israel and I don't think that's helpful at all to the cause of peace in the region, so it's refreshing for me to see films that reflect a staunchly Big C conservative left wing. In any other region that would be an implausible categorical definition. Nothing is implausible or impossible here.
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