When Israeli filmmaker Yoav Shamir, a former soldier in the Israeli army, was called an anti-Semite by a Jewish journalist for his film "Checkpoint", he began to take a close look at how anti-Semitism is understood today. To do this, he visited the Anti-Defamation League in the USA, the largest organization of its kind in the world, accompanied an Israeli school class on its memorial trip to Auschwitz, traveled to various places around the world to see how Jews today react to the world around them. But he also talked to scholars who are considered controversial in the Jewish community and hold extremely unpopular views.
The result of Shamir's research is the entertaining as well as chilling and thought-provoking documentary "Defamation". While the style of his production can most readily be compared to the work of Michael Moore, Shamir keeps much more in the background and takes a more restrained approach to the whole thing overall than Moore likes to do. This doesn't make the film any less effective, though. For the subject alone is exciting, interesting and controversial enough to captivate the viewer.
Shamir asks uncomfortable questions, forcing the viewer to critically examine common ways of thinking. He reveals things that not only make you think, but downright angry. His film thus stimulates discussion and shows that it is time to say goodbye to prejudice and hatred if we want to have any chance at all for peaceful coexistence. In the end, Shamir sums up his insights perfectly: the past should not be forgotten, but we should stop clinging to it and instead live more in the present and for the future. Looking forward, and not always looking back. In view of the statement of an Israeli schoolgirl who still wishes death even to the descendants of the Nazis, this can only be most fervently wished for.
"Defamation" is a film as entertaining as it is important, an intelligent as well as courageous documentary, for which the following applies: absolutely recommendable!
Ein Artikel von Frankfurt-Tipp
