POLICEMAN

Director's Statement

In the 60s and 70s, when political terrorism rose in Western Europe, Israel was socialist, basically egalitarian. Today, Israel has the widest economic gaps in the Western world. Class conflicts are shadowed by the conflict with the common enemy − the Palestinians. But, below the surface, a rage and a feeling of abuse are boiling. In POLICEMAN they mature to an eruption, strangled by a force greater than itself. I tried to create a collision between two groups, each an expression of one of the conflicts − the national and the socio-economical. The routine of the policemen of the elite unit is the clash with the ‘Palestinian enemy’. Their virility and their readiness to fight is the expression of a country in which the sidewalks and coffee houses are filled with men who have fought in wars and killed. They are confronted with a small group of young radicals. They kidnap three Israeli billionaires during the wedding of the daughter of one of them. They are ready to kill or to be killed in order to free society from the oppression the majority sees as a normal life. Members of both groups share a combination of great naivety and great violence. Both of them lack complexity outlook and dialectic view. They are prisoners of their own values, of their own truth, of their own moral system, of their own existence. Ignoring the existence of the other enables the violence towards the other − physical violence in the policemen, rational violence in the revolutionaries.