Sderot, seconde classe / Sderot, Last Exit by Osvalde Lewat (review)

Osvalde Lewat’s film Sderot, seconde classe / Sderot, Last Exit has its origins in an invitation from Erez Pery, art director of the Cinema South Festival held each year at the Sderot Cinematheque in Israel. The festival is run by the Film and Television School at Sapir College (eight thousand students) where Pery teaches. He invited Lewat to screen her acclaimed 2008 film Une affaire de nègres/Black Business in 2009. Lewat’s subsequent project, Sderot, Last Exit (2012) is a portrait of this unique audio and visual arts department. Only one-and-a-half miles from the Gaza border, in a zone where rockets sometimes fall, Israeli and Palestinian students at Sderot study together on a course that takes the underlying tensions into account, in an attempt to position cinema as a possible arm against mainstream conformist thought.

The school was founded by Avner Faingulernt, whose magnificent Hommes sur le bord / Men on the Edge (2005, co-dir. Macabit Abramsonn) portrayed the gradual deterioration in relations between Israeli and Palestinian fishermen due to political events. The resultant tension runs throughout Lewat’s film and is what makes it fascinating. The question of living together is posed as a question of cinema, or in other words, the way in which reality is portrayed. This means documenting people’s words, focusing on them, observing Pery’s classes, where animated debates take place between the students about the films analyzed. Pery constantly brings the focus back to cinematic considerations: how to film without betrayal? How to portray the context? How to fight indoctrination? How to position symbolism?

Several impressionistic interludes—checkpoint bag searches, anti-missile shelters, visits to the homes of Sderot residents—contextualize and thereby reinforce the film’s central argument, while the few questions put to Faingulernt and Pery allow them to describe their approach. They are fighters, but with no illusions. The central question is the influence of this school, whose very existence is a bugbear to some. This is where reality uncompromisingly slashes ideals and where the film highlights the contradictions. While a conversation between students, their tongues loosened by alcohol, recalls how enduring prejudice is, reproducing a hierarchy between them, the voice-over indicates that only fifteen percent of the films produced at the school break out of the usual navel-gazing or commercial film modes.

Lewat shot some preliminary footage and was planning to return for a proper shoot. But given the sensitivity of the subject, she didn’t manage to find extra funding and had to make do with what she had already shot. This can be felt in the avenues opened but then not really explored—for example, the Palestinian feminist who is given a considerable platform, but then is no longer there to defend her point of view and her intellectual and human positions. We thus jump somewhat from viewpoint to viewpoint, in the process losing some of the human depth of Lewat’s previous films. Above all, further development would have enabled her to go beyond simply capturing the debates in order to explore the contradictions behind the apparent dialogue.

Clearly, however, in addition to offering the rare experience of seeing how highly contentious themes play out elsewhere—a fine opportunity to “de-indigenize” them—this film has the considerable merit of reposing the question of the role of art in advancing our lives together. It doesn’t focus on joint realizations in a gushing, back-patting manner—like a mixed orchestra putting on a concert together in difficult conditions—but on the difficulties of the terrain, where the shadows are darker than idealists might hope. In the footsteps of Nabil Ayouch’s My Land (2011), Sderot, Last Exit blends the pain of observation and the vigor of utopia, these two terms without which we cannot hope to document the real.