Afterward

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.

If you are someone who likes to contemplate the complexity of human relations without looking for easy answers, this is the film for you. Ofra is a shining example of how to stay engaged with all sides of a traumatic situation so that each voice can be heard in its unique wisdom. She does not force interpretation, but allows the viewer to reach deep into themselves, in order to be touched by the various forms of suffering.

A hopeful vision of the transformative power of true presence, and authentic listening. This film is an excellent tool for teaching, and raising deep questions.

The film documents a personal journey to address a long standing hatred and fear of Germans that takes the narrator from childhood walks with her uncle, to Israel face to face with Palestinians discussing the occupation. Through a dozen or more interviews Ofra discusses her own past growing up in Israel, examines the trauma wounding both sides, and asks what our responsibility and complicity is now. These are not questions answered by the film; the audience is allowed to see each person in their full humanity and to try to answer for themselves as she traces the decisions she and her family have made along the way. A very powerful and compelling story that has stayed with me for days after seeing this moving film.

This film should be seen by everyone. It provides a deeply moving, sensitive, insightful and thought provoking understanding of current attitudes and historical antecedents to the current climate in Israel and Palestine. I grew up in a community that was deeply connected to Israel where many people traveled there and chose to live there as adults and spoke of Palestinians only with extreme derision. As an adult I learned that the full story was more complex than I had known.

This film portrays Israelis and Palestinians in their full humanity. Perhaps when people begin to reach across the historical divide and fully appreciate the humanness of their "enemies" a lasting peace may become possible.

Everyone should see this film!

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.