Amit Goren MAKOM

MAKOM - A Place Apart

by Amit Goren

My father, a Jewish immigrant from Alexandria told my brothers and I many stories that were related to specific places in the city of his youth: The famous promenade ("The Corniche") along the beach, the seaside night clubs, the costume parties at homes of friends where they danced cheek to cheek on New Year's Eve, playing basketball for Maccabbi Alexandria at Beit Shalom Jewish Community Center, the swimming pool at The Sporting Club where he swam professionally, the family home on Delta Street, the dining table where the extended family gathered regularly for lunch at midday, before retiring for the afternoon siesta, and also of the late night card games, on that same table, that he watched from behind his father's back. At age 21 my father boarded a ship to Marseilles to participate in agricultural training in the south of France, prior to his immigration to Israel. He was to pave the way, along with his brother, for the rest of the family, already feeling the threatening winds of political change in Egypt, following Israel's independence in 1948. That place Alexandria became a part of the way I perceived my father. The stories of his childhood were exotic, mysterious and at times ephemeral. They were not supported by any existing images of Alexandria that I had. Growing up in Israel in the early 1960's meant that Egypt was your most feared enemy, a place forbidden and threatening, dark and faceless. Therefore any description of normal life there always tended towards abstraction. My father's stories supported what I gradually realized - that he was not an Israeli, he was from another place, one that fed those tales told with excitement and a gleam in his eye. Alexandria became a real place for me many years later when I finally could travel with him back to his native city. It was a journey towards an awareness of his Egyptian body language and the sounds of his newly discovered Arabic. It became clear how much of an Alexandrian Egyptian he really is. There was also an understanding that though Alexandria for me is still a place apart, from now on it is also, to a small degree, a place that is part of my own identity. These days my father lives in Los Angeles and I'm sure he still dreams of Alexandria, certainly not of Jerusalem (while for many of his Jewish American friends Jerusalem is at the emotional core of their affinity with Israel). It is a place of longing, even if only in an abstract sense. It is a symbol, an image of a place, an imaginary site, an abstract figure ("makom" in Hebrew means place but it is also one of god's names) where Jews can fuel their sense of identity (even while they continue to be Parisians, New Yorkers or Scandinavians). Being an immigrant myself I am intrigued by the influence of a place on one's identity and curious about the effect of a place's tactile physical aspects and its attributed emotional and spiritual qualities, on the perception of ones' emplacement and displacement in the world. In the films I've made I raise questions about places within The State of Israel: as a concrete historical and political territory but also as a mythical place - The Promised Land(s), The Holy Land. I experience Israel as being a country in constant state of flux. Its society faces troubling questions about the morality and justice of its continuing occupation of the Palestinians, the future of the state's final, legal international boarders, whether freedom of religion should mean the separation of religious institutions from politics, the dangerously widening gap between the rich and the poor and many other questions. It is a place boasting of being a democracy, yet that democracy is constantly subverted by a far too high percentage of "over privileged" (e.g. Orthodox Jews…) and "under privileged" (e.g. Arabs…). Israel is a land inhabited by more than 120 different cultural and national origins and a variety of religious affiliations. Israeli society bears the heavy load of its numerous immigrants and their cultural differences. It carries the scars of an endless war, occupation and terrorism. Its inhabitants are in constant dialogue, sometimes monologue, with the qualities, the advantages and disadvantages, of the place where they chose to live. Many carry very clear images of other places. Therefore the understanding of one's place is a vibrant issue and an open question. The dynamism of Israeli society with its Jewish majority, and Moslem, Christian and Druze minorities, is driven by the insistent examination and transformation of one's physical and emotional place within the greater whole. Ultimately the issue of place is also a matter of identity; belonging to a place, having a relationship with it, a history and traditions that are born out of living experiences, that mold one's self image and the image one projects outwardly. The films selected for this program examine the issues of place as microcosm of Israeli society. A story told in or about a specific place can become a revealing and enlightening fragment of reality; a filmic-artistic focus, in turn, can imbue a place with new meaning while recreating it as an experience of discovery. The films will examine a "makom" (place) - a site or location, a zone of occurrence, one containing an event or a dramatic situation, a personal story or a memory - a place with a unique and meaningful story, while attempting to address some of the important questions raised within Israel today.