TOWARDS JERUSALEM

What became of the dream of a jewish homeland?
On the road from the west towards Jerusalem. A documentary road movie: trucks, gas stations, construction workers, soldiers, Russian refugees, taxi drivers, security guards... Encounters on a mere 40 miles with divers landscapes and individual stories.




16mm – 85’ – color - 1:1,33
optical sound - OV german / hebrew / english / french/ arabic
subtitles: german, english, french

A film by Ruth Beckermann
Cinematography Nurith Aviv,
Sound Jochai Mosche, Othmar Schmiederer
Editing Gertraud Luschützky

Premiere 23.2.1991, Internationales Forum des jungen Films, Berlin, Delphi-Palast
Cinema release 12.4. 1991, Votiv Kino, Vienna
festivals Berlin, Montreal, Rom, Florence, Jerusalem etc.

The land which TOWARDS JERUSALEM presents is indeed one of great vitality, yet it has also been americanised far beyond the limits of kitsch, and furthermore is characterised by bitter poverty. The film-maker lets herself drift and is not determined to to have her prejudices confirmed; she decides to simply look around and listen out, regardless of what might happen: Ruth Beckermann’s open eyes are a sign of her love for the world.
STEFAN GRISSEMANN, En face, in: europamemoria, 2003

„It was the challenge to make a political film, which would ignore the established expectations. I was not concerned with reproducing images of throwing stones, gunshots and breaking bones brought to us by daily TV, and which essentially do contain an extract of the truth. In this film you never see stones being thrown, but you occasionally hear aeroplanes and shots. This tension enters through the ears, predominantly …
A childhood memory of a blue and white collecting box, from a Zionist organisation, stood at the forefront of this film project. Once a week, I would put the remains of my pocket money in it, contributing to the development – buying land and trees etc. – of my Israel. Now, I wanted to go and see what they had done with my pocket money.“

RUTH BECKERMANN in an interview with CHRISTA BLÜMLINGER, January 11, 1991

TOWARDS JERUSALEM is not about a chronological recording of history or a clear-cut eva- luation of the short and conflict-loaden history of Israel; it is a snapshot, an instantaneous portrait which seems to set itself the Marker principle as a leitmotif: ONE NEVER KNOWS WHAT ONE IS FILMING. Thus no stone-throwers appear in the film, but again and again one hears shots or planes flying overhead.
On the way to Jerusalem it is not only the many different landscapes , secular and religous buildings which in this country are often invested with several different mythological mea- nings, that reveal themselves, but also very different cultures: proud Ethiopian women sit- ting in stoical calm, their lack of Hebrew or other foreign languages causing irritation on the part of their new compatriots; newly-arrived Russian Jewish women who talk about Israel’s strength with conviction. Their faces reveal the dream they have taken with them from Eastern Europe, evoked as a repeated leitmotif by the strains of Tschaikovsky’s SERENADE MÉLANCOLIQUE. The film ends, as it has to, before the journey ends, because the object of desire can never coincide with the real Jerusalem.

From CHRISTA BLÜMLINGER, Le souvenir partagé (Retour de memoire. Rencontres cinématographiques de la Seine-Saint-Denis), Paris 2000
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