Kedma

(2002)

Directed by

Amos Gitai

Review by Zach Saltz

Amos Gitai’s Kedma (2002) begins with a women slowly and seductively removing her top, and proceeding to fall on a bed where her husband makes passionate love to her.  The scene is unabashedly erotically-charged, as the camera casually and voyeuristically intrudes on the couple’s quiet intimacy in apparent isolation.  But after a few moments, the husband, Janusz, inexplicably stops midway through, puts on clothing, and walks away from his visibly distressed wife, only to reveal a host of desolate onlookers, robed in dark, heavy clothing.  Janusz then climbs up a ladder and steps on the main deck of the freighter the couple have been traveling aboard all along.  Contrasting the highly personal, serene lovemaking are images of seasick passengers vomiting overboard, while others huddle together for warmth amidst the cold ocean breeze.  Intimacy and comfort must be sacrificed for the sake of a dream.

These onlookers are European Jews aboard the Kedma (meaning “Toward the Orient”), one of the many rusty old cargo freighters transporting its displaced war-ravaged passengers to the Holy Land of Palestine. The date is May 7, 1948 – only a handful of days before the independent Israeli state will be declared, and the solemn faces of the Kedma’s passengers, a continental cross-section of concentration camp survivors, illustrate an attitude that is hardly gleeful about the prospect of yet another journey into diaspora as a result of persecution.  “I want to cry, I want my tears to reach the whole world,” a sober chanteuse somberly sings to her fellow exiles.  Another man quietly asks: “If God loves us so much, where was He when they were killing us in the camps?”  If there is any hope that Holocaust survivors can band together and form their own autonomous state, it will rely on their ability to unify through mutual grievance over the loss of their loved ones; indeed, their conversations with one another are comprised squarely personal accounts from the ghetto and the Eastern front (in one revealing scene, a Russian asks a Pole what to shout in battle instead of “Long live Stalin!”)

Once the Jewish passengers reach land, they immediately encounter a band of flag-waving British soldiers equipped with automatic weapons; the unit is immediately overrun by Haganah units bringing the Kedma passengers to safety at the nearby Kibbutz.  By this time the British, sensing the growth of the Haganah after their raids of Arab districts in Jerusalem (known as Plan D), had slowly began to withdraw troops from fortified strongholds, “cleansing” themselves of the imminent bloodshed that was sure to ensue from the Arabs and the Jews.  But Gitai is careful in assessing their assumed bloodthirsty hostilities; indeed, the central scene of the film occurs when a group of lost Jews encounter a band of Arabs on horseback who have been driven out of the region.  Klibanov, the navigator, asks an Arab woman at the head of the pack from whom the group is fleeing.  “The Jews,” she replies, “and who are you fleeing from?”  “The British,” solemnly replies Klibanov.  It does not take long for the Arabs to realize that they have encountered the very people responsible for their mandatory departure, and it appears that a skirmish has begun – until both sides, exhausted from traveling, simply give up and let each other pass.  Fatigue, piety, and resentment toward foreign invaders may be perhaps the only two things the Arabs and the Kedma Jews share, but both are powerful forces in mobilizing support for each side’s mission to peaceably inhabit the Holy Land.

Sadly and inevitably, however, the mutual desire for peace is not long-lasting, and the Jews’ desire for arable land and sustenance is overtaken by a desire to fight for that land – not merely to assert their control of it, but to legitimize their claim to it as a result of their perceived superior ethnicity.  “I hunger not for bread, nor thirst for water, but to see your bodies riddled with bullets,” a young man named Menahem valiantly proclaims regarding the Arabs.  It is in this virulent capacity for fighting that writer-director Gitai makes a critical judgment toward the Jews; “if you want to live, you must forget,” one refugee says of the Holocaust, “and if you want to survive, you must forget.”  But while the painful memories of the bloodshed of family members lost to vicious Nazis occupies a central place in the minds of the Kedma Jews, they appear to have conveniently forgotten the torment of seeing their own ghettos overrun with soldiers executing men, women, and children at will – which is precisely what the Haganah units do without guilt to local Arab villages and evacuees.

Indeed, a question one must ask when viewing a story involving Arab-Israeli relations is whether its author creates a fair and balanced perspective on both sides; Amos Gitai appears to accomplish this balance extremely well.  The viewer does sympathize with the Kedma Jews as a result of their plight from Europe, but perhaps not so much with their actions.  Crucially, however, the director also includes a scene of truculent Jews bullying a hapless elder Arab couple and confiscating their mule to carry a dead body.  “We’re not trained like you, we’re not organized,” the old man shouts, as he is abandoned in the middle of a battlefield.  Some critics, such as J. Hoberman, have called the episodic and polemic nature of Kedma “less a movie than a symptom inviting diagnosis”; but this is precisely Gitai’s point with his emphasis on long, expressive shots of empty land, suggesting that true possession of Israel was as vague and vacant in 1948 as it is today.

Rating: