States of UnBelonging by Lynne Sachs
Cinequest: San Jose Film Festival
Screenings March 11 and 12, 2006
What separates each of us from the other? Director Lynne Sachs explores this complex question and others in her haunting new film States of Unbelonging—a beautiful poetic journey that searches for how one person understands another across cultural, historical and political divides.
The two people in question are Sachs herself and Revital Ohayon, an Israeli filmmaker killed by terrorists. Like Sachs, Ohayon was a mother, a filmmaker, a teacher and a Jew. Though she never met Ohayon, Sachs examines the onslaught of modern media that united both artists, mediated through the letters, messages and phone calls exchanged with Israeli friend, Nir Zats. Deeply interested in “history’s histories and raptures,” Sachs embarks on a private journey to ponder issues of identity, violence in the Middle East, and the hope for union, culminating in an unforgettable visit with Ohayon’s grieving family.
Intensely personal yet thoroughly accessible, States of Unbelonging is a profound meditation about living in an unstable world, with the personal densely blurred with the historical. Drawing on a wide variety of forms, from TV coverage to phone messages and film, Sachs has created a challenging, invigorating film-essay that could rank with the multi-layered ruminations of Chris Marker.
Fernando F. Croce
FILM THREAT
http://www.filmthreat.com/print.php?section=reviews&Id=9181
STATES OF UNBELONGING
Directed by Lynne Sachs
Review by David Finkelstein
(2006-07-21)
2006, Un-rated, 63 minutes
This haunting film is at once a documentary, a highly personal film essay, and a poetic meditation on the human consequences of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. The film tells the story of how Lynne Sachs became gradually drawn into the story of Revital Ohayon, an Israeli filmmaker who lived on a kibbutz directly adjacent to a Palestinian refugee camp, and who was killed, along with her two young sons, by a terrorist in 2002. (To add to the horror of the story, her young husband heard the entire gruesome murder on his phone.) Sachs reads about the story in the New York Times, and begins a correspondence with an ex-film student of hers, Nir Zats, who lives in Israel. It is natural that Sachs is fascinated by the story: like her, Ohayon is a female Jewish filmmaker with young children, trying to make films which address social conflicts. Like her, Ohayon was opposed to the Israeli occupation of Arab lands. (”She believed that peace must pervade,” says her mother.) Ohayon was a fiercely independent thinker, whose films, shown here in fragments, tell stories of women who strongly assert their right to define themselves. Ohayon’s story holds a key to how a woman, a mother, and an artist can find a sane way of living in a world of seemingly irreconcilable conflict and violence.
From THE JEWISH WEEKLY
February 24, 2006
“States of UnBelonging”
at Makor Steinhardt Center of the 92nd St. Y
“Of all the literary formats, the essay, perhaps, seems the least suited to cinematic adaptation; with its intensely personal nature and often rambling paragraphs, it appears to elude the sort of tight structural discipline demanded of a coherent piece of film. All of which makes Lynne Sachs’ achievement all the more impressive: Here is a cine-essay, maintaining all the benefits of the original format while adhering to the demands of the visual. At the heart of the film is Sachs’ two-year exchange of letters and pictures with her Israeli friend Nir Zats, an exchange that begins when Revital Ohayon, an Israeli filmmaker and mother, is killed in a terrorist attack on her kibbutz near the West Bank. Soon, Sachs herself embarks on a journey to visit Ohayon’s grieving family, and her film becomes a meta-essay of sorts, meditating on fear and filmmaking, tragedy and transformation, violence and the land of Israel. This elegant and beautiful piece of filmmaking is greatly enriched by its soundtrack, featuring works by some of the Jewish avant-garde scene’s best and brightest, including Jewlia Eisenberg, Raz Mesinai and Basya Schecter.”
George Robinson
New York Underground Film Festival
States of UnBelonging
By Lynne Sachs in collaboration with Nir Zats
Documentary 63:00 Video 2005
The two-and-a-half year correspondence between two friends, one based in New York and the other in Israel, makes up the bulk of Lynne Sachs’ (Investigation of a Flame, NYUFF 2002) personal documentary States of UnBelonging. Exchanging letters, emails and phone calls, Sachs and her Israeli friend Nir Zats work together to uncover and record the story of Revital Ohayon, an Israeli filmmaker and mother senselessly killed in a terrorist attack in the West Bank. With nothing much to go on but a newspaper clipping and a name, Sachs and her friend reveal the story of Ohayon’s life through footage from her own films, television news reports, and finally the amazing discovery of a home video of Ohayon’s children in preschool, just before she was killed.
In contrast to the urgent voices of the two filmmakers discussing the Israeli-Palestinian situation and the fate of Ohayon, we are shown quiet images of Sachs herself, her children, and the serenity of their daily activity at home in New York. This is a quiet alternative to the frustrated investigator looking for some answers, and the images of her family life do seem safe, far enough away from the violence she investigates to be rendered still.
This documentation of Sachs’ life at home added to the evidence about the death of Ohayon abroad makes the film as much about its own process of discovery, of education and time’s effect on truth and perception, as it is about the mystery of Ohayon’s murder itself.
