A Wing and a Prayer

This is a very interesting documentary that sheds some light onto a topic that is not very well known. This has brought a new understanding to a huge turning point during Post-World War 2. As you watch you will feel the determination, passion, and risk taking that all the people have faced during this time of struggle. This is one movie that will truly hit home with a lot of people.

Boaz Dvir has truly invested a great deal of time and effort in making such an amazing documentary that both captives it's audience and immerse them into the story. This will inspire young people to take chances and risks to better themselves.

The filmmaker, Boaz Dvir, has done a great job of bringing out the adventurous tone of the story. All the interviewed people are passionate about the role they played in delivering the weapons and fighter planes. Also the parallax, albeit a bit too fast in motion, really brings to life the still pictures. A big part of this film is still images, and that's fair because the delivery to Israel was not recorded in video, for the major part. Also, Dvir's personal connection to the film (his grandfather), adds another layer of depth to the story. Even though the film is a documentary, it is also the story of a man trying to know more about his roots- where he came from, and I think this personal touch makes this film all the better.

The film and its characters show differences of the younger generation from that time and now. Besides the important of the film and the impact of the characters, the film also compares differences of the generations in terms of planning and actions. In the film, we confront men who have the same goal, but are different in many ways. They did not plan or overthink as much as today's generation does. A well-constructed plan might be a good way to approach things, but the characters in the film went after their goals without over- planning and thinking too much. Their actions screamed their values, goals and ambitions. Breaking prisons to help escape the Jewish prisoners is one of the many great examples of their actions. And less planning, less words and more actions did, indeed lead to a Jewish state. At that time, the people involved in this spent more time working together as a team and with passion than planning cautiously and waiting for something to take place. They remained with their goal and completed it by not waiting and making a move. This is an off-guard topic or issue in the film, but it certainly differentiates the generation during Al Schwimmer's time than now. We tend to see differences in terms of planning and major events taking place during that time a lot more often. I think about college students today, who being the same age as those young men at that period time, I think about how much we procrastinate just about homework or the next exam, and we overthink ten times before writing the beginning of an essay.

It's the first time for me to watch such kind of movie that shows something I nerve know or never think about. With the film moving on, I feel more and more engaged in that history, and I did respect those people in the interviews of the film so much. They were the true heroes of that time, and there are no reasons that this story should be forgotten by history, and there are also millions of reasons that we should remember and learn from it. By the way, the film is good for telling the story via showing maps, pictures, and videos of that history.

This is a story full of touching for me while I was watching it. Before I watched the film, I was not so clear about that history of those kind of secret part of the WWII. Via interviews of Scwimmer, I could imagine how hard for them to survival at that time, let alone building their own country. What makes me feel so powerful is some old videos related alternated in the whole film, which brought me to that history frame to see how great Schwimmer and his men had done.