Gei Oni

The Israeli film Gei Oni (Valley of Fortitude) (2010) was written and directed by Dan Wolman. It takes place at the end of the 19th Century, when European Jews were emigrating to Palestine and establishing homesteads. It's clear that this period in Israeli history corresponds to our Wild West, with the inhabitants of the land-- Bedouins--seen as its rightful owners or as hostile natives, depending on your point of view.

At any rate, the Jews, who had to negotiate with the Turkish rulers of Palestine, as well as the Bedouins, hardly found the land they purchased to be the fabled land of milk and honey. In fact, it's portrayed as a terribly dry, rocky, wasteland.

A young Russian immigrant--played by the beautiful Tamar Alkan-- arrives in Palestine with her elderly uncle, her young baby, and her developmentally delayed brother. She is clearly a highly refined and educated woman, but these qualities are not of much value in Palestine. She contracts a marriage of convenience with a Jewish farmer, who takes her, her child, and her brother to his homestead. He is a widower with two young children and they need a mother. He needs a wife, although his new wife is not prepared to welcome him into her bed.

The plot begins there, and the remainder of the film is filled with loss, heartbreak, brutally hard work, and great sorrow. This isn't a movie where the settlers get the crops in and then all gather for a barn dance. Their poverty is palpable, and they are often hungry, sick, and frightened. Still, they persevere.

I recommend this film. Just don't approach it expecting Little House on the Prairie. Expect rather a film of power and strong emotions.

Try to see it on a large screen, because the stark beauty of the desert will be partially lost on DVD. However, see it in any way you can. You won't readily forget it.

This movie was shown at the excellent Rochester Jewish Film Festival, and screened at the wonderful Dryden Theatre at George Eastman House. It was chosen as the Best Picture at the 2010 Jerusalem Film Festival.

'Gei Oni' based on a book by Shulamit Lapid and directed by Israeli veteran Dan Wolman is the kind of epic story from the beginnings of the Zionist endeavor in Palestine at the end of the 19th century that includes elements that are well known to most Israelis, but may be very little known or known from a very different perspective outside Israel. It tells the story of a young woman named Fania, a survivor of the anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia who arrives with no possessions and a baby-girl in her arms in the strange and hostile environment of a new country, where small groups of Jewish immigrants were just starting to return to their ancestral homeland to find it very different from the promised land dreams and hopes. She marries a widower of Syrian-Jewish origin and moves to a small settlement near Safed, were the immigrants are facing drought, arid land and the hostility of the Arab neighbors living in the area for centuries prior to their arrival. It is a tough pioneering story combined with the personal drama of Fania and her relationship with her husband Yechiel.

From one of the few critical reviews already published about the film I read that it is designed as a TV mini-series of six episodes out of which a less than two hours version was cut for the big screens. This can be felt in the version that I saw which is focusing on the personal drama and leaves of the screen the development of the most of the supporting characters. The result looks somehow unbalanced as long scenes follow the personal endeavors of the main characters without adding much each to the other, while side characters which we guess have each their interesting story to be told (Fania's brother, the Poet, the Arab girl) are being just sketched. I could feel that Wolman has enough experience to tell a story but I would have liked more daring and originality in the dialogs, some of them seeming to be taken out of history text books. Overall the film succeeds in bringing up the landscape of the period with beautiful exteriors that catch a Galilee just starting to be modeled by the human presence and costumes carefully crafted for authenticity. Acting is low-tone most of the time, growing in intensity only in the key scene towards the end which is really moving. Besides Tamar Alkan and Zion Ashkenazi in the lead roles I especially enjoyed the supporting part of Yidish-speaking actor Yaakov Bodo as Fania's uncle.