Ivory Coast War Chronicles involved more than just scripting and filming, and things got a little hairy from time to time. “That is why I stopped after five years,” explains Lacôte. “Each side took me and said ‘you must say this and this.’ So for me, today, it is better to work with fiction. It is safer and less threatening to the different sides.”Lacôte comes across as a serious professional who is willing to go to great lengths to ensure he gets a quality product for his efforts. Even so, he says he sometimes had to back off while making Ivory Coast War Chronicles despite having had some valuable inside information on where and where not to venture. “I worked with just a couple of people but there were some situations when I said we wouldn’t film something, because it was too dangerous.”The Ivorian says he feeds off real-life events. “Before making films I was a reporter when the Berlin Wall fell and that gave me a strong feeling and bond with actuality. I am a documentarist and a director but I always want to work near and around actuality.”During his Jerusalem stay, Lacôte worked on his script together with seasoned Italian scriptwriter Gino Ventriglia who, Lacôte says, helped the project move along appreciably. “We agreed on around 80 percent of the script right at our first meeting. This is the second version of the script and Gino gave me all sorts of small tips about characters, which I think is very important.”Lacôte says he appreciates the conditions at Mishkenot Sha’ananim, even though he does not take a site-specific approach to his work. “I like this place and the feeling I get from it, but I can work anywhere. I am from Africa and in Africa you cannot make silence. You cannot say: ‘I am writing so I need silence’; that is not possible. So you just get on with your work, whatever the conditions.”The name of the work-in-progress was chosen carefully, to convey a number of ideas. “The name of the film is Run; it also the name of the main character and it also describes the energy of the film,” Lacôte explains. “It is the story of a young man, age 21, who has three lives and he moves between them by running. I can’t say that it is an African idea but I can find this sort of thing in, say, Salman Rushdie books. It is not a Western style of telling stories, it is another form. I like the idea of having several lives in your life. I feel that about my own life too,” he adds. “I like the idea of destiny, but I like to take mystical things and put them in a concrete situation.”THE STORYLINE of Alvaro Brechner’s film also flits between reality and an imaginary world. The eponymous main character, Mr. Kaplan, lives very much like his fellow former European Jews who escaped the Holocaust to South America. But, at the age of 75, Kaplan suddenly gets an urge to do something of note, something for which he will be remembered. He decides that an elderly German man who owns a nearby beach restaurant is, in fact, a runaway Nazi and he sets out to ensnare the imagined war criminal.“I think it was George Bernard Shaw who said: ‘Life is not about discovering who you are but about creating who you are.’ And as a filmmaker, I create people the whole time,” says Brechner. “But I never know how they get related to me. That’s the beauty of the journey of discovery, of what you are doing while you are doing it.”Brechner says he is generally happy to go with the flow. “I never try to understand why I am doing what I am doing, although I need to understand the characters. I am the kind of person who, if I know exactly why I am doing something before I do it, I lose my appetite for it. I think that discovery keeps you fresh and keeps you alive.” That doesn’t mean that Brechner never knows how his film will end when he starts it. “I do the screenplay so I know how things work out, but what sometimes changes is what it means to me. Like with my first film, it was only many years later that I discovered what it meant to me. You mustn’t be over-conscious of what your film is about, because then you will lose the energy you need to go on that journey.” Considering how well Brechner’s debut offering, Bad Day to Go Fishing, was received, the man may very well be onto something here.Mr. Kaplan has some autobiographical aspects to it, even though Brechner says it largely the stuff of fantasy. “It is basically a story of an old man who happens to be a Polish Jew that emigrated to Uruguay. I like to say it is an imaginary story of my grandfather, who also came from Poland. But it is a story he never lived. Maybe he would have liked to live this story, but he never did.”Brechner got the impetus to start working on Mr. Kaplan when he attended the Warsaw Film Festival a couple of years ago. “I visited my grandfather’s town and a lot of memories of him came back to me and that was really the seed for the story. But it’s not really a story about the Holocaust. It is a story about getting old.”For Brechner, being in Israel is inspiring and, to an extent, helps him reconnect with his Jewish roots. Some of that comes through in Mr. Kaplan. “The film is a sort of dramatic comedy, and it has a lot to do with what I think is Jewish humor. You know, there is this Jewish thing that even in the darkest hour, if you can laugh you will find a way to survive.”TZIVIA BARKAI, 32, has certainly had to negotiate some serious obstacles in her lifetime. She was born and raised in the religious settlement of Beit El and, over time, realized she was a lesbian. That did not sit well with her parents or their community. But Barkai has moved on to live with her partner in Ramat Gan and says she does not consider what people in Beit El may think about her current project, which is loosely based on her life. “I haven’t lived in the religious sector for some time and I am not interested how people in that community might react to my film,” she declares.The film is called The Red Heifer, which references the biblical sacrificial animal whose ashes were used for the ritual purification of a Jew who came into contact with a corpse. The story is based on a young girl who lives in a religious
Extraordinary direction
A highly-talented and select group of young filmmakers visit the country to develop scripts based on their own experiences.
Ivory Coast War Chronicles involved more than just scripting and filming, and things got a little hairy from time to time. “That is why I stopped after five years,” explains Lacôte. “Each side took me and said ‘you must say this and this.’ So for me, today, it is better to work with fiction. It is safer and less threatening to the different sides.”Lacôte comes across as a serious professional who is willing to go to great lengths to ensure he gets a quality product for his efforts. Even so, he says he sometimes had to back off while making Ivory Coast War Chronicles despite having had some valuable inside information on where and where not to venture. “I worked with just a couple of people but there were some situations when I said we wouldn’t film something, because it was too dangerous.”The Ivorian says he feeds off real-life events. “Before making films I was a reporter when the Berlin Wall fell and that gave me a strong feeling and bond with actuality. I am a documentarist and a director but I always want to work near and around actuality.”During his Jerusalem stay, Lacôte worked on his script together with seasoned Italian scriptwriter Gino Ventriglia who, Lacôte says, helped the project move along appreciably. “We agreed on around 80 percent of the script right at our first meeting. This is the second version of the script and Gino gave me all sorts of small tips about characters, which I think is very important.”Lacôte says he appreciates the conditions at Mishkenot Sha’ananim, even though he does not take a site-specific approach to his work. “I like this place and the feeling I get from it, but I can work anywhere. I am from Africa and in Africa you cannot make silence. You cannot say: ‘I am writing so I need silence’; that is not possible. So you just get on with your work, whatever the conditions.”The name of the work-in-progress was chosen carefully, to convey a number of ideas. “The name of the film is Run; it also the name of the main character and it also describes the energy of the film,” Lacôte explains. “It is the story of a young man, age 21, who has three lives and he moves between them by running. I can’t say that it is an African idea but I can find this sort of thing in, say, Salman Rushdie books. It is not a Western style of telling stories, it is another form. I like the idea of having several lives in your life. I feel that about my own life too,” he adds. “I like the idea of destiny, but I like to take mystical things and put them in a concrete situation.”THE STORYLINE of Alvaro Brechner’s film also flits between reality and an imaginary world. The eponymous main character, Mr. Kaplan, lives very much like his fellow former European Jews who escaped the Holocaust to South America. But, at the age of 75, Kaplan suddenly gets an urge to do something of note, something for which he will be remembered. He decides that an elderly German man who owns a nearby beach restaurant is, in fact, a runaway Nazi and he sets out to ensnare the imagined war criminal.“I think it was George Bernard Shaw who said: ‘Life is not about discovering who you are but about creating who you are.’ And as a filmmaker, I create people the whole time,” says Brechner. “But I never know how they get related to me. That’s the beauty of the journey of discovery, of what you are doing while you are doing it.”Brechner says he is generally happy to go with the flow. “I never try to understand why I am doing what I am doing, although I need to understand the characters. I am the kind of person who, if I know exactly why I am doing something before I do it, I lose my appetite for it. I think that discovery keeps you fresh and keeps you alive.” That doesn’t mean that Brechner never knows how his film will end when he starts it. “I do the screenplay so I know how things work out, but what sometimes changes is what it means to me. Like with my first film, it was only many years later that I discovered what it meant to me. You mustn’t be over-conscious of what your film is about, because then you will lose the energy you need to go on that journey.” Considering how well Brechner’s debut offering, Bad Day to Go Fishing, was received, the man may very well be onto something here.Mr. Kaplan has some autobiographical aspects to it, even though Brechner says it largely the stuff of fantasy. “It is basically a story of an old man who happens to be a Polish Jew that emigrated to Uruguay. I like to say it is an imaginary story of my grandfather, who also came from Poland. But it is a story he never lived. Maybe he would have liked to live this story, but he never did.”Brechner got the impetus to start working on Mr. Kaplan when he attended the Warsaw Film Festival a couple of years ago. “I visited my grandfather’s town and a lot of memories of him came back to me and that was really the seed for the story. But it’s not really a story about the Holocaust. It is a story about getting old.”For Brechner, being in Israel is inspiring and, to an extent, helps him reconnect with his Jewish roots. Some of that comes through in Mr. Kaplan. “The film is a sort of dramatic comedy, and it has a lot to do with what I think is Jewish humor. You know, there is this Jewish thing that even in the darkest hour, if you can laugh you will find a way to survive.”TZIVIA BARKAI, 32, has certainly had to negotiate some serious obstacles in her lifetime. She was born and raised in the religious settlement of Beit El and, over time, realized she was a lesbian. That did not sit well with her parents or their community. But Barkai has moved on to live with her partner in Ramat Gan and says she does not consider what people in Beit El may think about her current project, which is loosely based on her life. “I haven’t lived in the religious sector for some time and I am not interested how people in that community might react to my film,” she declares.The film is called The Red Heifer, which references the biblical sacrificial animal whose ashes were used for the ritual purification of a Jew who came into contact with a corpse. The story is based on a young girl who lives in a religious