World’s first Hasidic Western

The BBC has an article by Tom Brook about an unusual movie:

One consequence of the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict, not just the recent violence in Gaza, is that it’s pushing some young Israeli directors away from realism and into fantasy.
“My film is disconnected from time and place, it has nothing to do with Israeli life,” says 34-year-old Tel Aviv-based filmmaker Guilhad Emilio Schenker. His picture, Madame Yankelova’s Fine Literature Club (photo, top), currently in post-production, is Israel’s first feminist cannibal mystery fantasy film. The director, who recently gave up a career in journalism to focus on filmmaking, views his professional embrace of fantasy as a response to living in a country where conflict is routine. “To see a fantasy, to see a fairy tale, to see something else than what they have on the news every day repeatedly with bombs and alarms, and wars and politics:  that’s maybe the reason that I wanted to make this film,” he says. His movie has an outlandish premise; it depicts a women’s reading club where the membership has a secret agenda to capture handsome men, murder them, and then make hot dogs out of them to sell in an amusement park. “For me it was very important to not talk about subjects that are usually discussed in Israeli films,” says Schenker, who is part of a new generation of filmmakers in Israel creating a wave of fantasy that includes horror films, slasher pictures, zombie movies and even Westerns.
These genre films stand in stark contrast to Israeli cinema staples, which have often been movies that touch on the Arab-Israeli conflict, family dramas or stories relating to the Holocaust.
“I think it’s a sign that Israel’s film industry is actually maturing. It’s breaking into other areas,” says Isaac Zablocki, director of the Israeli Film Center in New York City. “I think you see a new generation looking beyond the conflict and beyond the establishment of the state of Israel and its reflections. I think there’s the young generation that is looking for a normal existence like everywhere else in the world.”
Another new Israeli venture into genre cinema is Der Mensch (photo, bottom), a film in the making that could be the world’s first Hasidic Western. It is being directed by 28-year-old up-and-coming Jerusalem-born filmmaker Vania Heymann. The picture follows a Hasidic hitman hired by women whose husbands have refused to grant them a get, a religious divorce; as the film paints it, these contract killings seem to be the only way out of their marriages. “They usually solve it in court, in Jewish court,” says Heymann. “I wanted to create a universe where the laws are more like in the Wild West, so we had to make this special fantasy world inside Jerusalem.”
His picture was inspired by a short film he made which shows a Hasidic hitman waiting in a Wild West-style landscape on the outskirts of Jerusalem chomping on a cigar as his victim approaches. It’s certainly not the kind of imagery one associates with Israel or Judaism. For Heyman there are clearly new ways of telling Israeli stories which are quite separate and apart from the Arab-Israeli conflict. “If the same story is being told over and over again, sometimes you need to find new stories to tell. It’s just, you hear about it so much. Sometimes you want to hear something different,” he says.
The director, who was raised in an Orthodox Jewish home, claims his project, although a fantasy, is enabling him to examine some very real aspects of the ultra-Orthodox community and how it operates. But he says some people in the community have been “very displeased” with his story because they see it as misrepresenting reality, but Heyman emphasizes: “I’m not trying to represent reality, but to tell a fictional story. I think it’s a different approach, because I was brought up as Orthodox. I got to study a lot of Judaism in school, and now I feel like I can use it in a different form, in fantasy filmmaking, because there’s three thousand years of myths and stories and culture that can be used in films and stories in a different way than it was told.”
Genre filmmaking in Israel only arrived four years ago with the low-budget picture Rabies, which was the country’s first slasher film, made by the directing duo of Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado. But it was their follow up picture, the horror thriller Big Bad Wolves, released last year, which really put them on the map. It earned a trove of Israeli awards, it had distribution in over fifteen countries and, more to the point, it won a very influential endorsement when Quentin Tarantino declared it “the best film of the year”.
These emerging Israeli genre filmmakers are very connected to pop culture, having been exposed to influences well beyond the Middle East. “This generation is no longer living in an isolated Israel like the generations before it,” says Isaac Zablocki. “Since the internet came along, Israel’s really taken on a more progressive role as far as being an international player, and by making these films I think they’re saying, ‘We’re part of the international world. We are not just Israel. The world is global, and we can make films about any topic and any genre.’”
But the established dynamics of Israel’s filmmaking community can make it difficult for genre directors to move ahead. Often it’s only Israeli pictures that conform to traditional expectations that make headway with programmers at international festivals. “A lot of Israeli films that are about day to day life or are within the genre realm are overlooked by a lot of international film festivals and the American market for instance,” says Isaac Zablocki. “They’re looking for films that are dealing with Palestinians, or with the conflict, or with sometimes the Orthodox world and definitely with the Holocaust.”
Despite the challenges there is a lot of passion among these genre filmmakers and although they profess what they’re peddling is escapism, their stories are often touching on real issues by way of subtext, allegory or allusion. One of the co-directors of the slasher pic Rabies acknowledges that an aspect of the film can be seen as a representation of paranoia in the culture.
But there may be a limit to how well a genre film can handle the challenges posed by contemporary Israel. Vania Heymann cautions that dealing with the reality of the Arab-Israeli conflict through fantasy filmmaking may just be too challenging.  “I think it’s very hard to deal with the conflict in a fantasy way, because it’s already a big mess,” he says. “It’s also complex; every story has so many different specifics that everyone tells the story differently.”
Israel’s recent venture into genre filmmaking certainly shows promise but it is still in its formative stages. Isaac Zablocki wonders what the impact of the recent deadly violence in Gaza might have on the mindset of Israel’s new genre filmmakers. “They might go back to wanting to tell stories that are very much connected to fighting for their existence, which I think was disappearing, and it might be coming back now. We’ll have to see,” he says.
The Arab-Israeli conflict, the very subject the country’s new genre filmmakers have been struggling to escape from, could possibly snap them back into reality-oriented cinema. The conflict affects virtually every aspect of life in Israel and it may ultimately determine whether or not this new wave of Israeli cinema thrives or dies.

Rico says he'd vote for a Holocaust movie done as a Western...