TANTURA

Director: Alon Schwarz

2022, Israel, 95min., NR

Language: English, Hebrew and Arabic with English subtitles

Screenwriter: Halil Efrat, Alon Schwarz, Shaul Schwarz

 

In his new documentary, Israeli director Alon Schwartz bravely takes on a controversial event in the War of Independence – one that still proves anger, confusion, and grief. But what to Jews fleeing the horrors of World War II was a courageous battle for existence, to Palestinians, moved from their ancestral homes, was Al Nakba – the Catastrophe. When Israeli graduate student Teddy Katz meticulously documented a massacre of Palestinian civilians in Tantura in 1948, he was initially celebrated for his groundbreaking work. But soon, he was stripped of his degrees and was publicly shamed as a fraudulent traitor. When decades later incendiary new evidence was found, filmmaker Alon Swartz rushed to interview aging Israeli soldiers and displaced villagers, raising questions about how Israelis — and all of us — deal with the darker chapters of our history.

A nominee for Best Documentary, Israeli Film Academy and Best World Documentary, Sundance Film Festival. “Schwarz does a fine job expanding the scope of a he-said/they-said dispute into a bigger story about cultural amnesia.” Simon Abrams – The Wrap