"Tomer and the Scratched," a documentary film written and directed by Tomer Heiman that will be shown on cable Channel 8 next Monday, deals with relations between what is usually called "marginal youth" from the town of Azor and Heiman, who worked with them for three years. Heiman's film documents for the most part the third year of the warm and complex relationship he had with seven vivacious, hurt, rebellious young people hungry for warm attention, and the crises they went through during the months the counselor and the youths wrote a play about their lives.
This documentary film is special in that it builds a drama. Tension is aroused in the viewer of the difficult encounters documented in the film around the question of whether a play will indeed emerge from the conflicts between the counselor and the youths, and whether the youngsters - who never give up - will be able to write. (Among themselves they follow the odd colloquial usage of the Hebrew word lirshom, meaning "sketch," "note," "draw" or "register" for "write," which expresses a non-committal attitude towards the act of writing). And then, if they will be able to stage what they have written.
Tomer Heiman, whose steady persistence in the comment-writing project arouses respect, consistently faces them with uncommon honesty and frankness. He tells them simply how Shai Tubali, a director who volunteered to help them with the work, disappeared after three months and went to Canada without saying good-bye to them. Heiman replies courageously to their accusations that they had been abandoned by the director to whom they exposed their inner selves more than they ever had before in their lives, and he motivates the group to go back to believing that writing a play is possible.
The opening shots in the film show the familiar conditions in the development towns and distressed areas in Israel: the ugliness, the misery, the peeling plaster walls of the public housing projects, the barber who is never in the barber shop and so on. Anyone who has had contact with young people who grew up in such places knows the taste of the pointlessness, the despair and the giving up in advance on any attempt to change anything. About this place where they grew up, the teenagers themselves joke with a roughness that does not hide the misery, and their clever shrewdness arouses expectations.
"Tomer and the Scratched" is a kind of contemporary "Pedagogic Poem" - though without Makarenko's slap in the face and without the optimistic socialism in the novel that in its day was famed as the ideal model of the educational process. It focuses indirectly on the question of whether it is possible to form a meaningful and egalitarian connection between Tomer, a young man from North Tel Aviv who wants to do something significant with his life, and the teenagers who are alienated, angry and pessimistic to the point of paralysis.
One of the most touching moments in the film is the depiction of a meeting between Tomer and Yaakov, the most outstanding boy in the group, that is scheduled to take place in a cafe on trendy Sheinkin Street in Tel Aviv. "But how will I know where it is?" asks the teenager - who so far had looked like someone who was not afraid of anything - in great alarm, and then he refuses to enter the cafe and justifies his refusal by muttering that he does not belong here. Instead of in the cafe, they end up talking in a car at a car-wash that arouses in Yaakov, 18, a childish and charming gaiety, and there he also explains that his motivation and that of his friends for writing a play about their lives derives from the wish that "they will see that we are not a bunch of juvenile delinquents."
Yaakov is the one who gives the play its title, "Tomer and the Scratched," and with a gesture of his arm that embraces the group, he elaborates on the meaning of "scratched."
The drama round the question of whether there will or will not be a play and a performance increases at the moment during one of the crises that typified the writing of the play (which took a year and a half) when the boys demanded that Tomer open up to them in a way that would prove his serious attitude towards them. "You never tell us anything about yourself," Yaakov charges him, and Tomer obliges and reveals to them that he is a homosexual.
At that moment the camera focuses on the face of Oren Yakobovitch (the camera is completely hidden throughout the film, which gives viewers the sense of spontaneous truth that is not being documented) in an expression of utter alarm and embarrassment at Tomer's simple declaration. This is a critical moment that tests the force of prejudices as opposed to attitudes toward an individual. And all the teenagers pass this test wonderfully: Though they cannot joke around for a while, and they do not refrain from expressing their concerns about their own sexual identity, in the end they overcome the hurdle of their fears and its vulgar manifestations - and even join their counselor in the 1999 Gay Pride parade through the streets of Tel Aviv.
The high point of the film - and this is a very moving climax - is the performance of the play in Tzavta hall in Tel Aviv, from which the teenagers derive a deep sense of achievement and fundamental, innocent excitement. Had this documentary film been saccharine and false, the director would have chosen to end it with the performance at Tzavta. But "Tomer and the Scratched" is also a true and penetrating documentary film about the possibility of bringing problematic youth into life in society. Therefore Heiman chose to end the film with footage of the day of the boys' induction into the Israel Defense Forces and with brief subtitles about their history. Thus, it turns out that Noam went into the weapons corps as a driver, went to jail and was demobilized from the army after a year; and Meir - the clown of the group - went into the intelligence corps and in the middle of basic training was transferred to serve as a cook; Yaakov, who worked for eight months in the kitchen of the Orna and Ella cafe on Sheinkin Street, joined the Nahal (combined settlement and military service) when he was inducted into the army.
This restrained and silent ending, the opposite of the gaiety around the production of the play, signals the difference between "life," with its everyday difficulties and the promise hinted at by a few moments of great light. No one, not even Tomer who built up such a good connection with these boys, can really transform what appears to be the way of the world and bring total redemption to the group.
Promises to keep
The documentary film "Promises," written and directed by Justin Shapiro and B.Z. Goldberg, which is now being screened at the London Cinema in Tel Aviv, also deals with the relationship between one adult, the scriptwriter and director of a documentary film and seven children - Jews and Arabs - and the relations among the children themselves. And it too builds up to a promising climax.
For three years, beginning in 1997, Goldberg followed a group of children living in Jerusalem and its environs and talked in front of the camera with Mahmoud, a sweet, intelligent and likeable child who lives in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City and is an enthusiastic supporter of Hamas; with Yarko and Daniel, Israeli twins from West Jerusalem, who are also sweet, innocent, curious and intelligent; with Shlomo, a serious ultra-Orthodox boy who lives in the Jewish Quarter; with Sanabel, a child dancer whose father is an activist in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and has been held for two years in an Israeli prison without trial; with Moish, the boy from Beit-El, a Jewish settlement in the territories, who dreams of throwing all the Arabs out of Jerusalem; and with the charming and pensive Faraj, a 100-meter sprinter, who lives in the Deheisheh refugee camp.
Almost all of these children, just like their parents, teachers and the rest of the adults around them, live in the fervor of the prejudices that are so familiar. Fear, hatred, suspicion and the like surface in nearly every conversation between Goldberg (who grew up in Jerusalem and returned there from the United States in order to make the film, which was completed before the outbreak of the intifada), and the children, who speak to him with complete trust.
As in "Tomer and the Scratched," in "Promises" there are also moments of concrete confrontation with prejudices as opposed to personal encounter: Mahmoud explains to Goldberg with astonishing frankness why and how much he hates Jews (the scene takes place after footage of a street festival to mark the reunification of Jerusalem in the very heart of the Old City under the eyes of the Arab inhabitants, which is the very essence of the crudeness of the Jewish occupation) and therefore he refuses to meet a Jewish child. The director tells him that he himself is a Jew. "Half-Jewish," Mahmoud consoles himself. "No, not half-Jewish," says Goldberg in Arabic, "a whole Jew." And for a brief moment the boy is confused, broken-hearted because of the Jews celebrating their ownership of his city. And then he finally admits the possibility that there might be good Jews.
In addition to the thoughts and feelings that come up watching the tragic reality as it is perceived by children, the director also arouses expectations of a climax that is built up gradually: a meeting between Jewish and Palestinian children. In the end, this takes place between the twins Yarko and Daniel and Faraj from Deheisheh. For the first time in their lives the twins go through a roadblock and for the first time in their lives they see a refugee camp, and for a very moving moment when the meeting takes place, among the children whose prejudices have determined their generalizations, it seems that there is redemption: Yarko and Daniel play with Faraj, talk spontaneously with the other children in the group and slowly lose all hesitations and inhibitions and finally even play soccer in the Deheisheh field. For a moment, a kind of idyll of children and of innocence is constructed, until Faraj bursts into tears and explains that in a little while the film will be completed and Godlberg will go on his way and there will be no more such meetings.
The director did not choose to end the film with this promise. Afterwards, with great honesty, the camera documents his conversation with the twins (who have meanwhile grown two years older), who tell him frankly how they have been thinking about other things and how the connection with Faraj has been cut off ("At first there were phone calls but he did not understand how hard it was for us, like, to go to Deheisheh and afterwards there were no phone calls").
This maturation of theirs, like that of the other children, as well as the erosion in the routine of life (as opposed to its chosen moments) - entirely evaporated the initial experience of growing closer. The redemption that was implied in that moment in Deheisheh is not really redemption. It is just a single moment, a small and light-filled peephole into a promise that fails to be realized.
