May 01, 2009 05:00PM EDT

Discover: Defamation

Congratulations to Yoav Shamir, director of Defamation, who just won a TFF '09 Special Jury Prize. Defamation is a film designed to raise questions and provoke discussion. Shamir, a young Israeli filmmaker, adopts a deceptively simple pose as he ventures into addressing the issue of contemporary anti-Semitism. "What is anti-Semitism?" he asks his Israeli grandmother. "I've lived in Israel all my life. I don't know."

So Shamir journeys out into the world to try to understand the nature of anti-Semitism today. What is it? Where does it pop up most often? Who is afraid of it? His journeys take him to a far-flung assortment of places, meeting a wide variety of people who provide this film with a startlingly wide web of different opinions on the issue. He gets unprecedented access to Abraham Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League, and later follows him on a trip to Europe. He goes with a class of Israeli high school students to Poland, to survey the remains of concentration camps and the museums within. He interviews African-American residents of Crown Heights, a Brooklyn neighborhood that has had tension between blacks and Jews for years. He talks with Norman Finkelstein, a professor and author who has published extensively on Israel, all of his work highly critical of that nation.

As Shamir presents so many different sides of this intricate issue, one begins to see it materializing in front of oneself, almost presenting itself as a physical structure. The issue of anti-Semitism is such a sensitive subject, brought up so often, that to hear it dealt with so thoroughly is, in fact, thoroughly refreshing. One of the things that lends the film so much credibility is that Shamir is so clearly without an agenda; if he has one, it has been disguised extremely well. He's an Israeli Jew who is extremely inquisitive, and extremely good at playing the devil's advocate. He argues the opposing side to Foxman, but then also argues the opposing side to Finkelstein, who is 180 degrees removed, philosophically, from Foxman. He questions the residents of Crown Heights when they bring up The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in a positive light during an on-the-street interview.

The most harrowing and insightful section of the film is Shamir's footage of the Israeli students in Poland, who are constantly told to fear for themselves and be extremely careful, as they are in perpetual danger from neo-Nazis. The neo-Nazis never appear, but the young kids do seem to buy the line, and appear understanding when they are told that they cannot leave their hotel room at night. This makes their emotional responses to the truly horrific sights at the concentration camp museums all the more intense. Without giving anything away, suffice it to say that the closing of that narrative strand leads to a definitive comment by Shamir, one that gives the audience his own point of view in no uncertain terms.
 

---

Defamation has been picked up for distribution, so with any luck you will be able to see it soon.