Ahed’s Knee (2021 | Israel | 109 min | Nadav Lapid)
“Y.”, the Israeli filmmaker at the center of Nadav Lapid’s semi-autobiographical tale of overboiling frustrations has a lot on his mind. He’s in the the early stages of conceiving a new film about a Palestinian activist that takes inspiration in the reaction to an incendiary tweet. His mother, who’s also happens to be his frequent collaborator and screenwriter is gravely ill. A well-paid paid excursion to appear in a tiny remote village for the purposes of presenting his previous work has been sponsored by the Ministry of Culture. As much as this journey into the desert is a kind of honor, the trek has taken him away from both of these more pressing concerns and the toll is apparent.
He’s put up in a nice rental and given a full agenda, but his immediate instinct is to go for a walk. It’s there, in the midst of the dry dusty desert, that his intense feelings of rage and sadness over the state of his country, its blinkered view of its history and future, and its disdain for the souls of the Palestinian people comes to a dramatic head. His host is a smart, young, kind, intellectually curious young woman who rose from humble beginnings in the small town to a high ranking post in the culture ministry. She’s an admirable character who just happens to suffer the the misfortune of being the unintentional catalyst for a forty-something filmmaker’s personal revolt against the State’s long-simmering and suddenly intolerable hypocricy.
Nadav doesn’t do Y any favors in terms of likability, nor does he allow his audience many comfortable stretches as we follow him on this physical and emotional reckoning. The digital filmmaking is intentionally disorienting, with sharp swift camera pans that induce motion-sickness to communicate its subject’s wandering eye and the growing inner turmoil that erupts into external provocations. He lets the plot unfurl into flights of imagination and explores stories within stories through often unreliable narration. These breaks in traditional storytelling vernacular come in toe form of several hallucinatory dance breaks as its protagonist mentally tries on different outcomes for size. All of the discomforts, though, serve to put the viewer deeply into the volatile mindset of an artist who is negotiating the escalating conflicts of loving and hating a homeland, all the while employing the language of filmmaking to reconcile the furious tumult of deciding what to do about it.
Ahed’s Knee, which plays as part of the Official Competition, has its second in-person screening today at Ark Lodge Cinema and is available online through duration of the festival.
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