(SIVAN NOAM SHIMON and HADAS JADE SAKORI during promotional shooting)
How can you pack and unpack emotions outside,
how can you trasmit what goes on in your heart, your body, your memories?
How can you represent the complex, compact feelings,
the speleological experiences that make you who you are?
How to tell Life in Art?
How to make Your Life an Universal Tale
while conserving its individual personal and cultural color and taste?
Well, with great difficulty, commitment and exercise, if ever.
With a hermetical, life-long dedication and social convention's abnegation,
with the acceptance of social exile and relative poverty
in exchange for inner freedom and truthful expression.
And how to do all those things when you are a young Queer Lady in Israel today,
in your early forties with a passion and a deep-felt commitment, an actual existential urgency,
like a bite on your soul, an itch on your nose that won't go away,
to tell the tale of gay girls falling in love for the first time in Israel
at a historical period of extreme personal, familiar, social and political fragmentation?
Well, again, you shall need the genious, the refreshingly uncompromising attitude,
the single-minded dedication and matter-of-fact unapologetic obsession
of young Irsaeli filmmaker and scriptwriter MICHAL VINIK
and her rare talent to tell the story of a
"girl to girl" coming of age
and the pleasures and pains of queer love and identity quest,
set deep inside and told against the background of a disintegrating Israeli society
that protects no one and even less the queer lost in space girls.
pic (c) Haris Metaxa
This is all brilliantly done in Ms Vinik's first feature film "BARASH",
released last year (2016) and presented last November
during the rich and challenging Cheries-Cheris Lgbtqi Film Festival (CCFF) in Paris
where I had the pleasure of seeing it
and immediately run to interview MICHAL VINIK first
and later her two main actresses,
SIVAN NOAM SHIMON and HADAS JADE SAKORI
in order to tell you my story of discovering this new Queer Verismo
in Contemporary Lgbtqi Cinematography.
pic (c) San FEDE
pic (c) San FEDE
Presentation of the filmmaker during the CCF Festival
with a very good interpretation into French, rare event..
pic (c) Haris Metaxa
The Interview in a cafè by the MK2 Beaubourg where BARASH was shown the day before.
The filmmaker at the centre with the two main characters, protagonists of the love story.
pic (c) Haris Metaxa
(Writing the article at night at a Parisian cafè, CCFF catalogue.)
So, now you have seen the pictures and taken a breathe from this intense eulogy,
let's go back to our analysis.
As I was saying, Israel is shown in punk hyper-realistic, quite naked and cruel colors
(that do justice to the feeling depicted) to be totally fragmented and humanly alienated,
the social tissue irrimediably broken and all individuals let loose to their own devices
like crazy atoms with no unifing centre,
like lone apples falling from a tree in a no-gravity enviroment, suspended, never quite touching ground.
Lost in space, floating in a liquid universe that has lost all fixed and solid reference points.
Nobody has its place during historical ages and in places
when and where Reality explodes
and we cannot quite catch up,
as is our case in the film narrative with Contemporary Israel,
Reality escapes comprehension
and our ideas do not correspond any longer to the world around us.
All the characters in BARASH are lost and we feel for them.
Every single one of them.
But, still, we have seen similar characters before, we can decode their despair,
feeling of loss, the pull of a social escape.
But what we shall see for the very first time in this deeply touching and elegantly constructed, directed,
and interpreted film is how it feels to be a young girl falling in love with another girl.
The Social Void is actually helpful in Queer Love Dynamics,
socially you do not exist as a Queer Individual
so at a personal level you are totally free to define and position yourself inside this deep intensity of feeling, this carnal desire you are not supposed to feel and from which you cannot quite escape,
this uncharted emotion of making love fom the first time
(like a Golden Gender Austronaut walking for the first time on a Virgin Velvet Rainbow New Planet)
to a body specular to, yet not quite like, yours.
And still, lost as you are, it feels so queer and so natural at the same time
to be where you are
and to do exactly what you are doing.
The Cultural Taboo, your Natural Enviroment.
You are an Alien stranded in a Foreign Planet,
the one of Global Normative Heterosexuality.
Divorce from Society.
Home in your Desire.
Desire is your Home.
You have found Home.
You have found your Identity,
you know you shall Exist from now on in this Double Female Body,
in this New Hidden Continent on the border of Social Reality and Acceptabilty.
You are on the Border but you are Not Alone anymore.
You can scream with pleasure and delight
as one of the young girls, Naama, does in the movie
after she has made love to the girl she desires for the first time.
So just, so truthful, so simple.
Here, exactly at this Banal Point of Codification and Symbolic Representation,
Reality becomes Art,
Life becomes Film Narrative
and you do not feel in Exile anymore.
End of the Sexual and Social Exile for the Girls in the Movie
but also for the Queer Ladies in the audience,
"partout dans le monde",
everywhere in the world.
Now you can inhabit HER.
"HER" in general,
not as in This Specific Lover,
This Specific Double Body,
This Shared Carnal & Erotic and Sensual Queerness.
But the narrative in BARASH goes on, Joy, Loss,
Discovery of personal Strength and depth of personal Freedom.
"Even if Love doesn't flow, Life still can", as the poet in me has said.
MICHAL VINIK brilliantly tells us in words and images, in bodies and faces, in smiles and tears,
with the help of the incredible performance of both the two young real-life Queer Israeli actresses,
she tells us and offers us as a gift
this touching tale of girl to girl first love
and we feel the emotion of their eyes,
voices and bodies
almost on own skin.
Well, I did.
But, then again, I am quite partial.
Be as it may, it doesn't really matter what your Gender Identity and what your Sexuality is,
this is a Wonderful Film for Everybody who believes in Emotion and Truth and Beauty and Cruelty
told and shared through ART,
through FILM.
I am writing this a lot more than a month after I've seen the film at the fantastic CCF Festival in Paris
in the second week of November last, back in 2016.
My emotion still flows, fresh like when I first saw BARASH.
pic (c) Haris Metaxa
The film went on to win the Jury's award at the CCFF.
As I had already chosen the film to write about and had already interviewed the filmmaker,
I felt proud of Jury's good taste
and went on to cheer and to immediately tell the film crew on Social Media,
happy and proud myeself as if I had helped in its making!
Bravo to Economical, Punk, Cruel and Optimistic
(that's Dialectics for you, Folks, it moves by Embracing Contraddiction!)
Directing (and solid Script Writing) of MICHAL VINIK
and bravo to SIVAN NOAM SHIMON (Naama Barash)
and HADAS JADE SAKORI (Dana Hershko)
brilliantly and convincingly playing the girls discovering love and life.
They gave everything they've got, tried to find the truth of the characters in themselves
and they managed to make the characters complex, touching, convincing,
similar and separate at the same time.
We escaped with volatile life-pirate Dana and we felt lost and found and lost again with Naama.
They both felt like two girls we have met or we could meet in our real lives.
Complex, deep, uncompromising
and fighting to keep their heads above troubled waters and learn how to swim too.
I was very impressed when I found out that both were, at the time when the film was in the making,
non-professional actresses.
Well, now they showed they can become professional indeed or, better still, they really are already professional.
I wish them all the best and I hope they continue their creative careers, in movies and else.
Actresses and filmmaker make an incredibly talented and quite courageous triad
we have to keep in mind and follow.
BARASH, one of the best movies I have seen,
in all categories and not only as a Lgbtqi potrayal of love and loss.
IN ART WE TRUST,
IN FILM WE REST AND DREAM
(and CRY too sometimes...).
Can't wait to see what the trio will come up to creatively,
together in any combination and quality
or separately.
HAPPY NEW 2017,
Young Queer Female Israeli Talent.
Brave Ragazze et Merci,
Encore.
GENERAL LINKS and Photo Credits
(c) Haris Metaxa, Paris, 1/1/2017!
