The hammering rain, howling engine noise, and passing home fronts. On a confrontational course, a lady on a motorcycle, visor down, speeds down a Tel Aviv freeway. She finally enters a building, sits down, unfolds her clothing, and rips her tights, exposing her kneecap. To do so, an actor read a tweet in staccato staccato, as if firing a verbal machine gun salvo: The knee merits a bullet to render the wearer immobile for the rest of her life.
The woman is, it turns out, auditioning for a role in a film in which she would play a character who is involved in political events from 2017 and 2018. Ahed Tamimi, a 16-year-old Palestinian activist, was arrested and convicted after circulating a video of her hitting an Israeli soldier in the face on the outskirts of rioting in the West Bank. Bezalel Smotrich, a right-wing religious Israeli politician, then tweeted that she deserved a gunshot – “at least in the kneecap.”
This is the starting point for filmmaker X’s film project (Avshalom Pollak). At the casting, there is singing, a bombardment of handshakes, and ultimately, X. takes a hammer “to smash the knee.” X.’ has been pervaded by the activist’s defiant energy. But also politicians like Smotrich’s abrasiveness.
The director X. is a reincarnation of Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid, whose new picture is titled “Ahed’s Knee.” It’s no longer about the knee, the casting, or the planned film-within-a-film; instead, we’re immersed in the daily life of the filmmaker, who, like Lapid, is a harsh critic of his homeland. Lapid’s most recent film, “Synonymes,” earned the Golden Bear at the Berlinale in 2019 for its portrayal of a young Israeli who fled to Paris in order to abandon his dreaded mother tongue. Lapid has now returned to his birthplace to sue her on his own turf. He earned the jury prize for “Aheds Knie” in Cannes last year.
Soon after, Director X. travels to a small community in the Arava desert to show one of his previous films. Here he meets Yahalom (Nur Fibak), a Ministry of Culture employee. She hands him a form on which he must mark what he would speak on for the ministry. There are only safe subjects available to pick from. But, X. wonders, what if he wants to talk about the “loss of our country’s essence and its brutalization”? Is he able to tick that as well?
According to Nadav Lapid’s alter ego, Israel despises its artists.
The list, according to X., is a manifestation of censorship and tutelage: “differing viewpoints” artists are made more difficult or refused support. What is most likely being referred to is Miri Regev’s cultural policy, which she will lead until 2020 and against which there have been violent protests in Israel. Which is why X. wants to tape the Ministry of Art employee and have her admit that the Ministry of Art despises art and has declared war on all artists. But it is he who, in the end, screams his country’s wrath into the desert.
X. is a nameless collective that represents Lapid and other left-wing Israeli artists. He’s less of a character than a symphony of visual ferocity and political rage that serves to make the movie as unsettling as possible. Not only in terms of content, but also in terms of presentation. A back may be seen in the foreground, while the background is hazy. The remaining clarity is “squeezed out,” as if Lapid wanted to demonstrate how difficult it is to make a political film in Israel without wringing every shot out of the country.
Between the artist and the ministry woman, there is also a tenacious, tormented erotic tension, a continual approach in which their lips keep coming closer without ever touching. That is only logical: the kiss would represent the ultimate merger of artist and state, which must not occur. Furthermore, there must be sufficient space between the lips in order to talk, shout, or blame. It would be X if they kissed.’ Mouth stitched up, protest dead. Despite this, the artist and the state remain inextricably linked, almost kissing.
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This sense of dread pervades the entire picture. The anxiously panning, almost springy camera captures X.’s rage and energy, but it also ties the director to the desert he marches across, calling and dancing in. It places the filmmaker in the country in which he is fighting and on which X. lands on his stomach, his lips brushing against the stones. Then there’s X.’s military experience, which he tells Yahalom about in flashbacks and in which his role is so ambiguous and open that the lines between offender and victim are blurred entirely.
X. also wishes to flee Jerusalem, but realizes that “nothing will ever be able to separate you and me!” His protest includes an element of intrinsic connectivity. The political wisdom of Lapid’s films is found in the evidence of the impossibility of removing what has been accused and despised when it is already within oneself. Whether it’s a mother tongue, as in “Synonymes,” or a geographical area, as in this case. Lapid’s cinema would be nothing more than a political tract, a “position,” a simple declaration without this meticulous, formally brutal investigation of this connection. Lapid transforms his film into a self-destructive weapon. He even took financial backing from the Israeli Ministry of Culture at the very end, after everything had already been filmed.
Knee of Ahed, Israel, Germany, and France in 2021 – Nadav Lapid directed and wrote the script. Shai Goldman was in charge of the camera. Nile Feller’s cut Avshalom Pollak, Nur Fibak, and Yoram Honig star in this film. 109 minutes of great cinema. The film will begin on March 17, 2022.