Last month, I published a piece denouncing censorship at Canadian film festivals. In my text, I extended an invitation to Danae Elon, the director whose film had been withdrawn from the RIDM. 

She contacted me and we went out for a coffee to talk. But rather than presenting you with an interview about censorship, I’d like to offer you excerpts from our long discussion about her career, her films and a look at the situation in Gaza, Israel and Palestine. 

These subjects are central to the documentary filmmaker’s career and, as a result, her outlook is highly relevant. 

Meeting with Danae Elon

Danae Elon: I’m always in the process of examining the way I impact stories. And how does my voice impact what I see? Some of my films look at the complicity we have in larger conflicts through an intimate setting. It’s not just observing reality, it’s not just telling you the historical context, but it’s actually an attempt to break down the mechanisms that make us who we are. When it comes to Israel/Palestine—by now, I have lived through a great part of the conflict.

François Grondin: Your first film, when was it?

Danae: My first film I made in 1996  was called Never Again Forever. It was about the Jewish Defense League in Brooklyn. The film was a graduation thesis from NYU, where I was studying, and told the story of a group of extreme right-wing Jews who lived in New York and followed a fanatic rabbi named Meir Kahane. He harbored their sentiments of paranoia and convinced young people that antisemitism was on the rise in the United States during the seventies and eighties. Some of these men emigrated to the Occupied West Bank and were among the first violent settlers. They adapted  the American mythology of the Wild West and exported it to Palestine.

It wasn’t a very good film, but it had some very interesting moments and characters. For example, a mother and her son who lived in the Catskills had created a bunker in their basement just in case there would be a second Holocaust in the US. Her son was only seven at the time.

François: In New York?!?

Danae: Yes. The filming ends at a JDL demonstration in New York, two years before Rabin’s assassination in 1994. In this demonstration, they were all chanting “Death to Rabin, Death to Rabin,” and he was later shot by one of Meir Kahane’s followers.

François: It’s interesting, because since the very beginning of your professional career, you’ve been working on, let’s say, the same big subject. What brought you to work on this? Because, I mean, not a lot of people talk about that. Why did you find this topic interesting enough to pursue?

Danae: It was existential for me. Filmmaking and art have always been a search to understand why people do what they do, believe in what they believe, and what makes them who they are. The impact of growing up 25 years after the end of the Holocaust, in the early 70s, was profound. People who had lived through it were your teachers, relatives and friends. They truly believed they were now making a better world, that this couldn’t happen again.

As I was growing up, I realized that was a mask for a lot of dreadful things that had happened before or were happening now. Traumatised people are often blinded and full of contradictions. The occupation was always part of what we struggled against. I grew up in a demonstration almost every week since the age of ten.  I became obsessed with deciphering these contradictions—on one hand, a well-meaning ideological spirit of creating a better world, and on the other, a growing sense of historical distortion and injustice. If you truly believe you’re doing something good in the name of an ideological force, then something’s wrong, right?

François: I understand.

Danae: So, that’s been at the core of my being from the very beginning. How do we so quickly go from oppressed to oppressors? This was before I even learned about the Nakba and what happened to Palestinians in 1948. When I was growing up, nobody spoke about that.

François: It was a big taboo.

Danae: Slowly, I started peeling all those layers of facts and so-called facts that I both experienced and felt deeply, and then came to understand. That brought me to a certain form of political cinema. At first, it had an essayist form, and then it became personal when I turned my lens on my own family. I never felt comfortable telling stories about other people. I felt that only by looking at my own family could I find the truths I was seeking.

François: Yeah, because if I go back to P.S. Jerusalem, you literally present your family. Your situation is… How can I put it? You’re caught in between. You probably get some bashing from Israelis who think you’re a traitor because you defend the other side, but at the same time, you’re not Palestinian.

Danae: Well, I never see this tragedy as two sides. In terms of truth, it is one tragic story.

François: You don’t, but people do…

Danae: People can think what they want. That’s what I’ve learned.

François: I want to say that in your movies, we never get the impression that you’re trying to make one camp or the other look really bad.

Danae: But human beings are never really bad or really good, and any documentary filmmaker who makes one side look really bad or one side look really good probably betrays what being human is all about. We all have terrible things about us and great things about us. Anyone who pretends otherwise should put themselves more in check.

My role as a storyteller is not to please one side or the other. It’s to make one side or the other look at something I’ve spent a long time trying to articulate. I’ve spent, let’s say, five years thinking about it and struggling to create it. Now, of course, here is where complicity comes in. I disclose that it’s my way of thinking, and I’m presenting that to an audience. That point of view is always subjective. Telling stories about human beings requires understanding, and that’s what’s always interested me. Why we do what we do, how we get to thinking the way we do. It’s easy to say, “You do bad stuff, how dare you?” But understanding the monster—that’s where we come in.

François: I think it’s part of why I like your documentaries.

Danae: I’ll give you an example. Did you see Another Road Home?

François: Another Road Home?

Danae: It was my first feature film I made in 2004. Through seeing that movie, you will understand where it all begins. If in Never Again Forever, as a young filmmaker, I was possibly trying to please my father intellectually, in Another Road Home I sought to uncover deeper truths. It told the story of a Palestinian man my parents hired to take care of me as a child. He was part of my life for 20 years. I decided to make a film about the conflict from the perspective of our familial relationships.

A lot of painful truths came out in that documentary. It questioned the contradictions between mind and feeling, the contradictions we embodied as a family. One pivotal scene is when one of his sons asks me what their father meant to me. The tension between us at that moment, the feeling that I had taken his father away from him, is one of the strongest moments I have ever filmed. It revealed a truth from myself because that was what I was seeking.

So my career has always been embedded in trying to understand my own experiences in relation to this conflict. And then, it’s also been our lives, because we came here to Quebec so our kids would not grow up in Israel. My sons would not be a part of this horrific war. My life has never been disconnected from what has happened over there. It is a reaction to it, both in my films and in my personal choices as a mother.

François: Do you feel that… You talk about your kids, not wanting them to grow up in this war. Do you feel that lately, the conflict has moved here, between people? Not as a war in itself, but…

Danae: I think there’s no comparison between what is happening over there and what is happening here. Here, people are reacting to the horrors. Maybe they have family in the region where the war is truly happening. In Gaza and the West Bank, there is ethnic cleansing and a genocidal war. People here are trying in any way possible to sympathize, to do something, and they possibly feel trapped in an inability to act. I understand that. I understand that because we all feel that way. We all feel we want this to stop, and what can we do to stop it?

Here is where we have to offer an alternative. Here is where we have to contain the pain and talk. Social media does not help this process. It oversimplifies and does no good. People prefer to judge and cancel others, seeing reality in black and white because it’s too hard otherwise.

François: Well, I think that for most of us, we don’t necessarily realize it because we’ve never been in a war zone. You know, we grew up in a place where nothing happens. It’s not a bad thing. Actually, it’s a good thing.

But about what you say your job is. I can tell you that you have, at least, been successful at getting someone new to take real interest in what is happening there. And the more I know about the conflict, the more I’m stuck with… But whyyyy?

Danae: The WHY. In hindsight, we can look at history and try to understand the why. But we can also know that those justifications are never good enough. These truths are what I look for in my work, and I’ve always looked for them. Regardless of everything that has happened, I’ve never changed my mind about what is right or wrong. What I feel is the most just solution for all people to live in dignity. Those are my basic values.

François: Do you actually believe that at some point, a solution will be found? Or at least that something will be made to stop the hatred?

Danae: I want to believe that one day that will happen. But I think the only just and viable solution for what is happening today is that there will be a state of all its citizens from the river to the sea. That is the only way these two national conflicts, built one on top of the other with so much death and injustice, would ever see a future together.

François: Together in the same country or in two different states?

Danae: There are about 11 million people today living from the river to the sea in the whole of Palestine and Israel. Half are Jewish, and half are Arab. No one’s going anywhere. That is the bitter truth. So, for quite some time, there’s been a conversation: does that mean a two-state solution? Does it mean a one-state solution? Or does it mean another solution that allows these two peoples to live with each other in some form of peaceful exchange? That is just a fact. No one is going anywhere, and everyone will have to figure it out to stop the bloodshed.

François: Okay, I want to go back to the movies. You moved from different subjects. P.S. Jerusalem is centered on your family’s situation. Then there was The Patriarch’s Room, A Sister’s Song, and Rule of Stone. The themes are the same, but the big idea comes from different places. Do you choose your subject only because it’s something you’re passionate about at the moment, or is there a bigger picture?

Danae: It all comes from the same bucket of having grown up in Jerusalem and experiencing things quite intensely during the formative years of my life. Whether it was Jerusalem in the 70s, 80s, or 90s, a lot of my inspiration comes from that very powerful place. It’s just been explored in different ways. In my last film, Rule of Stone, I explored my lifelong obsession with architecture and how it expresses, in the most visceral ways, who we are and how we behave as human beings through the buildings we make and the spaces we cherish. I felt that a story about colonialism and occupation should be told through a very different prism—one of beauty and design.

When I was young, I would walk around the neighborhood with my father, and we would look at buildings and talk about how they expressed the people who built them and those who choose to live in them. I always found this fascinating because stones do not lie; they simply are. We just need to understand why they were made the way they were to uncover a deeply traumatic condition. Every film I make has that kind of source at its very beginning.

For The Patriarch’s Room, for example, I spent a lot of time at Jaffa Gate over the years, It was a place I loved, and saw change and wanted it to stop.  It always comes back to something very deep inside of me—something I don’t just find interesting at the moment but that has a profound effect on my perception. Then, it takes years to develop and decipher what that truly means, and eventually, it becomes a film.

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I want to personally thank Danae Elon for taking the time to bring you this conversation on a tough, but important topic.