The Spirit of Things (1999)

Overview

This film is a dialectical portrait of Israel’s most utopian endeavour: the kibbutz. In 1952 a French team shot a documentary on Kibbutz Beit Alfa, focusing on the 306 Israeli cinema mythological Sabra and depicting the communal life as heaven on earth. Almost half a century later Lev Tov uses that footage in order to deconstruct the idyllic picture and to examine the contemporary materialistic middle-of-the-road objectives. The narration is executed in ten different languages, from Yiddish to Hungarian, French and Arabic, articulating today’s multi-vocal and pluralistic reality and uncovering the various narratives that shaped the evolution of the kibbutz.

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