Our brilliant Cinémathèque here in Luxembourg City is featuring some Israeli Cinema these days, in the form of a festival called Regards sur le cinéma israélien and of course I would not miss it; I must admit it was a first, though. I should maybe also admit that I tend to favour the Palestinians, conflict-wise, if it's not very politically incorrect to say it like that, light-heartedly.
The programme, which goes on till mid-December, includes newer and older films, like Revolution 101, a Mike Moore-ish documentary by Doron Tsabari, Three Days and a Child (1969) that is part of the Israeli New Wave (yes, they do have one, as everybody else!), La Visite de la fanfare (2007) that won the Jury Prize at Cannes' section Un Certain Regard, and many more, most of them of festival circuit and art-house cinema fame.
According to the cinema historian Ariel Schweitzer, Israeli cinema is from the beginning of the 80s "a cinema of the Other", when the Other is, as Emmanuel Levinas and many other philosophers put it, the opposite of Me -and Me is a male potent human being that does everything right. The Other, in other words, may be: women, homosexuals, non-believers, and Palestinians, in this case.
