Ahed's Knee - Lapid's Creative Detonation
Nadav Lapid, the head of the jury of IFFI 2022, was recently cornered for his caustic remarks about 'The Kashmir Files', though film critics must admit that his film 'Ahed's Knee' (2021) is like wearing his heart on his sleeve. Lapid worked on a concept of a film-within-the-film on the real-life protagonist Ahed Tamimi, a 16-year-old Palestinian who was videotaped slapping and punching two armed Israeli soldiers, who wounded her cousin in a heated argument outside her home in the West Bank village of Nabi Salih. Not only Tamimi was arrested and imprisoned for eight months in 2017, but a member of Israel's legislature also tweeted, 'To teach a lesson for her misdemeanour she be shot at the knee'. 'Ahed's Knee' furiously aims a shot back at the Israeli government's unending collective culpability.
A middle-aged Israeli film director, Y (Avshalom Pollak), clearly a fictional substitute for Lapid himself, plans to make a film on Tamimi's ordeal. While the camera is seen whizzing around the knees during the screentests of the character, Y receives an invitation to screen one of his films at Arava in southern Israel, an arid desert town. He is welcomed by a young, flattering official of the Ministry of Culture, Yahalom (Nur Fibak). But the erratic and temperamental Y, a manifestation of the state's inescapable moral journey of life through the military regime, lambasts the officer straightway after she insists he sign a contract, with a series of state embargos restricting his artistic liberty, negating which can put him in serious trouble, even a blanket ban on his filmmaking. He retaliates in anger, "I will vomit Israel out of me into your cultural minister's face." The monologue continues as Nadav's fearless dialogue with his own country about intellectual bankruptcy. He finds a cathartic outlet in Y, falling on his knees, clinging tight to Yahalom while his film was being screened at the small-town library. On getting a hint of admission of his concern and even his shame in Yahalom, Y maliciously blackmails her also in the bargain. But, as a loving son, he keeps on sending mobile clips of beautiful landscapes to his ailing mother. As a matter of fact, Era Lapid, Nadav's mother, happened to be the co-screenwriter and the editor of all his films before she succumbed to cancer.
Restless and whipping cameras producing blurry images following Y's eye movement and gaze set a different tone of an artist's pun in the film. Cinematographer Shai Goldman may admittedly pose as an irritant, but some cool and animated musical sequences bring relief to the repetitive nature of the story. Pollak delivers a nuanced performance of a complex character while Fibak glows up in the end.
Having served as president of the jury board in several film festivals like Cannes and Berlin and after making films like, 'Policeman' that won the 'Locarno Festival Special Jury Prize' in 2011 and 'Synonyms', which went on to win the Golden Bear at Berlin in 2019, no wonder, Agnihotri's film hits Nadav as a work 'inappropriate' to his own artistic imagination, exactly like he detests the Israeli culture of ever foisted patriotism against Palestinians living in East Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank.
