Michael Phillips: Looking for the human cost of the Israel-Hamas war, through filmmakers’ lenses

I watched a brilliant and heartbreaking short film the other day, posted online by the New Yorker magazine as part of its story of filmmaker Yahav Winner, killed Oct. 7 in the Hamas extremists’ massacre of Israeli citizens.

Several times, for many reasons, I’ve returned to that film, titled “The Boy,” to imagine the career Winner might’ve had; to marvel at the patient, precise rightness of every visual decision he made; and to help an outsider, me, comprehend a conflict with a now-remote start and no foreseeable finish. Meantime, the Israel-Hamas war’s death toll includes an estimated 1,400 Israelis and more than 10,000 Palestinians. In a month.

“The Boy” is available on YouTube. It is 25 minutes long, and it is as wide as a humane filmmaker’s eyes can open.

It takes place where Winner lived with his filmmaker wife, Shaylee Atary, and their infant daughter: the Kfar Aza kibbutz a few kilometers, as relayed in New Yorker contributor Daniel Lombroso’s Oct. 27 feature, from the razor wire marking the Israel-Gaza divide. “The Boy” tells a fictional story of a young man, Barak (Nimrod Peleg), a war veteran now living at home again in a profoundly unsteady state of mind.

He is never far from the sounds of machine gunfire, or periodic Code Red warning sirens and the latest explosions not necessarily close yet never distant enough for comfort. At one point, Barak, at home at night watching a reality TV show with his parents and brother, is visibly shaken by another bomb going off in the vicinity.

Don’t worry, says his tired father played with subtle anguish by Yoram Toledano. “It’s ours.”

From there writer-director Winner takes “The Boy” deeper inside its title character’s traumatized state. Clinical and narrative details remain scant regarding his condition and combat travails. The sheer strangeness of life along this border, a time of relative peace but ever-threatening conflict when Winner filmed his project, fills the spare storyline to the brim, without thesis statements or polemics. As Winner’s widow Atary told the New Yorker: The young man in “The Boy” exists in a state of benumbed heartbreak, because “he knows people are (just) like him on the other side of the fence.”

Late in the film, Barak’s father exhorts his son to come home with him and try to sleep. “I don’t want to wake up,” Barak says, through tears.

“You’ve got to,” the father replies with a hint of pleading. The exchange carries an echo of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” which includes the lines:

“I can’t go on like this.”

“That’s what you think.”

These words of existential lament and human resignation know no borders.

What Barak can only imagine going on in Gaza becomes vivid in the hands of other filmmakers. In the 24-minute-long Oscar-nominated short “The Present” (2020), a Palestinian father (Saleh Bakri) and his preteen daughter (Maryam Kanj) embark on a shopping trip in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. The father’s mission: to buy his wife a new refrigerator — not a romantic anniversary gift, he realizes, but badly needed.

Now streaming on Netflix, “The Present” is a film of obstacles. Director and co-writer Farah Nabulsi, a British Palestinian filmmaker, filmed on location partly, without permission from the Israeli authorities, at Bethlehem’s Checkpoint 300. The story’s depiction of the imperious, bullying Israeli soldiers will not please Israelis. But Nabulsi did not set out with appeasement in mind.

“I wanted to tell a human story about a very cruel reality,” Nabulsi told a France 24 TV interviewer. Three years after she made “The Present,” the present has become prologue for a war with no end in sight.

A month prior to the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre, Nabulsi’s first feature, “The Teacher,” a drama about a Palestinian educator’s crisis of political conscience, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. “The Boy” director Winner never got that far. The Times of Israel’s obituary noted that Winner’s debut feature project went unfinished at the time of his death at the hands of Hamas extremists.

His feature, as he told one interviewer, took place in the village where he lived and was to be an examination of “the constant conflict that exists in you when you look over the fence at what is happening in Gaza.” The conflict, he said — ultimately costing him his life, while he managed to save his wife and daughter — is “traumatic because it has no solution, but within all of this there is comfort within the personal connections.”

This is what cinema can do if we let it. It provides connections between the lives on screen and lives like ours, and not like ours.

As Gaza transforms into a “graveyard for children,” in the Nov. 6 words of U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, as the fate of Israeli hostages taken by Hamas grows more uncertain, it seems faintly ludicrous to seek answers, or meaning, from a movie searching for the same. And yet I do, lately. Art shapes history, and has a way of indicating where we’re headed, for good or ill.

“The Boy” and “The Present” are merely two of hundreds of films, nonfiction, fiction, short or long, provoked by a geopolitical conflict that is now, once again, a war in flames and despair, and once again tearing people apart.

These two films are not front line dispatches. Nor are they justifications of slaughter. They work very differently, to different ends. But both serve as distillations of lives unfolding in a realm of appalling everyday reality.

If we can’t accept a politically and morally complicated Israeli response to that reality, then “The Boy” has nothing to say to us. If we can’t accept a depiction of the routine indignities of Palestinian life under Israeli military rule, then “The Present” is just emotional propaganda. And if we can? Then we can at least argue about the barbarism and hopelessness like human beings.

“The Boy” and “The Present” predate the current Israeli-Hamas carnage, but they’re full of portents. The films don’t talk to each other, exactly, but their respective filmmakers share a yearning for what, for now, remains unattainable. A dream.

Last week, The Guardian ran an interview with Winner’s fellow Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman, who made the haunting “Waltz with Bashir,” about Folman’s firsthand experiences in the 1982 Lebanon War. Folman finds the Western media’s reporting on the viciousness of the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre to be “hypocritical.” The filmmaker also said that after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s retaliatory escalation of missile strikes on Gaza, leaving 10,000 dead so far, Netanyahu “will never stay in power now.”

Folman added: “I still believe there is going to be a solution here. All my life, I had this feeling that after a massive catastrophe (like Oct. 7), there would be new order here in the Middle East.” He concluded with a line that sounds very much like “Waiting for Godot” relocated to a different place and time: “We can’t go on living like this.”

Both “The Present” and “The Boy” dramatize that same declaration — complicated by the awful prospect that we probably can.

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“The Boy” is streaming on YouTube courtesy of New Yorker magazine. “The Present” is streaming on Netflix and available on other platforms.

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