Afterward

Ofra Block a psychoanalyst and filmmaker powerfully engages in interviewing second generation Germans and Palestinians. She herself as interviewer- participant forced me as a member of the audience to confront past and current history and my own hard held beliefs and prejudices. She did this by showing what the act of truly listening to people who we look upon as enemies and who do not hold our personal views can be a gesture of taking responsibility. Her film raises many questions and does not attempt to give solutions. However what it does do is to put us on alert not to turn away from past history or our current political realities and to take heed and remember our humanity and that we are all in this together. It is also beautifully filmed and needs to be seen.

This is a different way to think about Israel and Palestine and to hear from people you haven't heard from. Ofra Bloch is a good interviewer and the people she interviews are not always happy with the questions she asks and she is not always happy with the answers. This is a brave personal movie. It's uncomfortable and thoughtful in a way few movies are these days.

A compassionate exploration of global wounds and the role of deep listening as a tool for healing ourselves and others. We are transformed as we participate in a deeply personal journey of an experienced psychoanalyst and filmmaker who travels across the globe to witness the stories of people she was taught to hate and fear. She attempts to ask without judgment the hard questions that will help her better understand global Transgenerational Trauma. She begins a conversation that may move us toward the possibility of a world without the cultural, political and religious violence that has created a rend in our moral universe. In the process, the director becomes her own subject and learns a lesson that alters the way she sees forever.

Afterward is a moving and courageous film about Ofra Bloch's personal journey of processing her own trauma and confronting her role in indirectly traumatizing others. It challenges us all to think about how this applies to us personally and to our world order in general. It was moving, provocative, and beautifully done. It's an important film to see.

Afterward

As a post World War II German gentile, this documentary really speaks to me.

Ofra Bloch, the director, is an Israeli-born psychoanalyst/filmmaker who has been living in New York for many decades. She uses the movie to highlight and listen to the voice of the "Other", e.g. the very people she was taught to hate such as Germans and Palestinians. She examines the dialectic between victims and victimizers. Her interviews with second and third generation descendants of Nazi perpetrators and with contemporary Palestinians living under Israeli occupation are haunting.

Bloch puts herself repeatedly into the film. We follow her from Germany to Israel and to Palestine. She uses her own story as a narrative arc, employs her professional interview skills and probes her subjects' most intense emotional quandaries.

The opening scene shows Bloch as a child in Israel helping her great uncle who lost his family in a concentration camp carry home a block of ice for refrigeration. Was this image meant to show how people can react to trauma by freezing the memories and fossilizing the hatred it created? Further historical black and white footage alludes to the shadows of history we all carry.

The movie raises profound questions. What legacy did we inherit from our parents and grandparents and what legacy do we want to leave our children? Are people capable of learning from history or are we doomed to repeat the cycles of aggression, revenge and more aggression? Is forgiveness and peaceful co-existence after such intense chronic conflict possible?

Will listening to the voice of the "Other", meaning the victims of our aggression, recognizing their pain and mourning their losses move the needle towards reconciliation? Or, are all parties pawns in a larger geopolitical imperialist struggle for hegemony in the Middle East that no acts of human kindness and neighborly cooperation can ever hope to halt?

The title of the movie implies that there there is an Afterward. It is a deeply felt and timely must see documentary.