‘Of Dogs And Men’: Hamburg Review

Dir. Dani Rosenberg. Israel/Italy 2024. 82 minutes.

There could be few tougher subjects for film-makers at current than the assaults and abductions by Hamas in Israel on October 7, 2023. Any try to make a movie about this notorious day should contact a uncooked nerve, each as a result of its violence traumatised a nation, and since Israel’s subsequent retaliation in Gaza has made it a lot more durable to invoke Hamas’s motion with out referring to the next struggle. However Israeli film-maker Dani Rosenberg’s Of Canines And Males, which is about near the Israel-Gaza border within the aftermath of that fateful day, in no means obscures Palestinian struggling earlier than or since October. Additional debate will certainly comply with the movie’s screenings in Hamburg following its Venice premiere. However for many viewers of Rosenberg’s movie, the quick query shall be how adequately it responds to the horror of October 7 – and there, it actually raises questions.

Rosenberg is to be lauded for approaching this materials with emotional restraint

Framed as a fiction however documentary in spirit, the movie is directed and co-written by Rosenberg (The Vanishing Soldier), whose 2020 function The Demise Of Cinema And My Father Too confirmed an acute consciousness of the contradictions of portraying actuality via the diffracting lens of drama. Of Canines And Males was shot near the border and at Kibbutz Nir Oz, one of many websites attacked by Hamas, the place some estimates recommend that 180 of the round 400 residents have been killed or kidnapped; the movie options members of the kibbutz speaking instantly about their expertise.

However the central determine is a fictional 16-year-old, Dar (Ori Avinoam), who wanders across the locale searching for her lacking canine within the days after the assaults. At Nir Oz, the place abandoned houses are seen semi-destroyed or ransacked, Dar meets precise members of the neighborhood together with Natan Bahat, an aged man who has chosen to remain on web site, and who muses in regards to the present state of affairs of a Palestinian pal dwelling throughout the border. Dar additionally meets Yamit Avital, a schoolteacher seen tidying at a now empty kindergarten, and Nora Lifshitz, a lady who rescues canines which have been stray because the assaults.

The movie may be thought-about trivial in specializing in a heroine whose foremost concern on this time of nightmare is discovering her canine. However it’s clear that the animal’s destiny stands for a lot of worries that afflict her, together with the whereabouts of her mom, extracts from whose diary are heard in voice-over all through. And the fictional Dar supplies the movie with the cellular viewpoint of a protagonist who, above all, listens to actual individuals who have endured horror.

Rosenberg has very clearly said the ideas adopted by his crew – together with Avinoam, credited as co-writer – relating to an moral method to evoking the assaults and their human results. The movie actually comes throughout as a sober try to deal with the unthinkable, avoiding intrusiveness and sensationalism. However it’s removed from clear how properly it succeeds, and maybe it isn’t but doable to totally assess a movie made so quickly – maybe too quickly – having been shot within the weeks following the assaults. 

Definitely, Rosenberg makes some questionable choices, one in all them to indicate moments from the assaults and aftermath in footage glimpsed briefly on Dar’s cellular; flicking via, she spares us lingering impressions of extremity, however this framing arguably distances these photos in a means that diminishes their energy. Extra contentious is the usage of animation (by Michal Faust et al) wherein a canine, presumably Dar’s, crosses into Gaza, discovering shelter and making widespread trigger with a distressed Palestinian boy. This factor brings an uncomfortable cost of sentiment, even kitsch; however it additionally contradicts accusations that the movie elides the ache of the Gazan inhabitants, the brutality of the bombardment very being very a lot within the forefront. And whereas we hear one offended Israeli demanding eye-for-an-eye retaliation, for essentially the most half the feedback of Bahat and others specific a want for peace and understanding between two beleaguered populations.

However whether or not the movie permits us to know both the horrors of October 7, or their after-effects – emotional, political or in any other case – for Israel and the world, that’s one other query. Rosenberg is to be lauded for approaching this materials with emotional restraint. However the movie’s light drift and its tendency to artwork cinema lyricism, delicate music included, mutes its impact significantly, even dangers aestheticising the trauma. Of Canines And Males could be understood as an act of compassion and solidarity, in addition to a direct try at groundwork in the direction of an oral historical past; however, regardless of its sincerity and moral warning, it solely begins to method its matter in in a really tentative means.