As a Palestinian, Duke senior Tawfiq Khoury hasn't had many opportunities to meet with an Israeli filmmaker. But Avi Mograbi is no usual Israeli filmmaker, and what isn't easy in some places can happen in a Duke classroom.
Mograbi visited this past Tuesday as part of a four and a half-day residency comprising film screenings, meetings with students, and a panel discussion with other Israeli filmmakers and faculty from Duke and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
Since 1989, Mograbi has mixed fiction and non-fiction storytelling in his films about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, critiquing Israel's treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories while pushing the boundaries of documentary filmmaking. His most recent documentary, "Z32," explores how the conflict affects an Israeli soldier.
Khoury said he found Mograbi's work, in which the filmmaker often appears as a character, provocative.
"It was interesting, different," Khoury said after seeing "Z32." "It was all told completely from the Israeli side, without any Arab influence, but it was still sort of a critique of Israeli policy.
"Somehow I wasn't expecting him to look the same as he did in the movie," Khoury adds. "When I saw him here in class, I was like, ‘Wow! That's the same guy?' I can ask him how he got the motivation to do that sort of piece, instead of something more canonical."
"We're extremely happy that we have the opportunity to have Avi Mograbi on campus and to feature his work," said Shai Ginsburg, assistant professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, who organized the visit.
Mograbi's family owned a popular Tel Aviv cinema when he was growing up, which is how he caught the filmmaking bug. "Do you think I caught this disease by accident?" he says on screen in ‘How I Overcame My Fear and Learned To Love Arik Sharon,' one of the film clips shown to audiences this week.
Mograbi said using himself as a character in a documentary is one of the techniques he uses to draw the viewer's attention to the filmmaking process.
"The person in the film who is ‘The Filmmaker' is not exactly expressing my views," Mograbi told students. "The idea of including the making of the film within the film is not just in order to discuss the issues that the film deals with, but also to discuss how documentary films are made, and yes, to critique how some documentaries are made. Sometimes the films that look the most spontaneous are also the biggest lies," Mograbi says.
In Mograbi's "Z32," an Israeli soldier wearing a series of digitally generated masks confesses to war crimes, while Mograbi as The Filmmaker sings his commentary by way of a Brecht-inspired musical score. The "musical tragedy documentary" was shown on campus Sept. 21 as part of the Screen Society's Israeli filmmakers series.
Wade Withington, a junior transfer student in Duke professor Rebecca Stein's "The Middle East in Popular Culture" course, said meeting Mograbi was a fascinating look at art and politics.
"I am incredibly thrilled that we can have a speaker like Avi come in here and talk to us like that," Withington said. "The fact that I can stay after class and ask an additional question of a world-renowned filmmaker, that's huge, at least for me. I'm not used to that."
Pictured below: Avi Mograbi talks with students in Professor Rebecca Stein's (middle) class last week. Student Tawfiq Khoury is left. Photo by Sylvia Pfeiffenberger.
