---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: ShunkW <shunkw@sbcglobal.net>
Date: Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 12:25 AM
Subject: The Man Behind 'Miral' Defends His Work, and No One Stopped Him
To: ShunkW <shunkw@sbcglobal.net>
The Man Behind 'Miral' Defends His Work, and No One Stopped Him
GETTY IMAGES
Star Power: Julian Schnabel with Freida Pinto, who appears in the film.
By Gabrielle Birkner
Published March 23, 2011, issue of April 01, 2011
<http://forward.com/issues/2011-04-01/> .
* Print <javascript:window.print();>
* Email <javascript:openwindow()>
* Share <http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php>
* Author Archive <http://forward.com/authors/gabrielle-birkner/>
* Community News <http://forward.com/sections/community-news/>
As a young boy, Julian Schnabel accompanied his parents to a grand Broadway
theater to see a screening of "Exodus" - the 1960 melodrama that depicts the
founding of the state of Israel. During a scene in which Jewish refugees
launch into a celebratory rendition of "Hatikvah," Schnabel recalls how
moviegoers, his family included, leapt to their feet, put their hands over
their hearts and sang along.
"Every time there was a battle, and certainly during the Six Day War, I was
absolutely thrilled that the Israelis won," Schnabel, the painter and
Academy Award-nominated director of the 2007 film "The Diving Bell and the
Butterfly," said in a recent interview.
The "Exodus" narrative on which Schnabel was raised, as the son of a
Hadassah chapter president, exists in sharp contrast to the one that he
presents in his latest film, "Miral." The movie is based on the
autobiographical novel by Schnabel's girlfriend, Rula Jebreal. The film's
title character is a motherless Palestinian girl, growing up in an East
Jerusalem orphanage and coming of age during the first intifada.
"Miral" is dedicated "to everyone on both sides who still believe peace is
possible." Yet the Israelis depicted onscreen - soldiers bulldozing homes
and countering rock-throwing with machine-gun fire, wardens whipping
political prisoners and settlers building homes in Arab population centers
because, as one character puts it, "what they really want is all of
Palestine" - don't necessarily come across as the peace-seeking sort.
The film garnered criticism from some of Israel's supporters in advance of
its March 14 screening at the hall of the United Nations General Assembly.
Haim Waxman, Israel's deputy ambassador to the U.N., asked the General
Assembly's president, Joseph Deiss, to reconsider the decision to host the
screening. So too did David Harris, executive director of the American
Jewish Committee.
Related
* The Most Important Nazi Film They Didn't Let You See
<http://forward.com/articles/131713/>
* Hollywood Hath No Fury Like a Jewish State Scorned
<http://forward.com/articles/103334/>
* Elliot Spitzer, Copyright Infringer?
<http://blogs.forward.com/campaign-confidential/4237/>
"The film has a clear political message, which portrays Israel in a highly
negative light," Harris wrote in a March 13 letter to Deiss. "Permit me to
ask you why the President of the General Assembly would wish to associate
himself - and the prestige of the office - with such a blatantly one-sided
event."
The day after the screening, which went on as planned, Rabbi Marvin Hier of
the Simon Wiesenthal Center said in a statement that the screening marked
"another sad day in the 63-year-old history of the U.N.'s bias against the
state of Israel."
In an interview conducted in a conference room of Palazzo Chupi - the
hot-pink West Village, Manhattan apartment building that Schnabel developed
and calls home - the filmmaker weighed in on what he thinks is behind the
allegations that "Miral" is anti-Israel.
"Maybe it's the simple fact that a high-profile film written by a
Palestinian is cause enough for Jewish opprobrium," said Schnabel, who
arrived wearing what has become a signature uniform: plaid shirt, pajama
bottoms and sunglasses. "Maybe it's because the director of the film, Julian
Schnabel, is Jewish, and his commitment to any perspective other than the
Jewish paradigm is akin to tribal and national betrayal."
Schnabel has insisted that the making of "Miral" was always an artistic
endeavor - never an attempt to encapsulate the entire Arab-Israeli conflict.
"I'm not a politician, and I'm not a historian, and I know that there are
lots of other stories that can be told," the 59-year-old artist and
filmmaker said during a panel discussion that followed the U.N. screening.
"But I thought I'd just try to tell this story - and it's about a family.
And my goal was... to see if the audience could care about these
characters."
Implicitly taking on those who say the film fails to present both sides of
the conflict, he compared his movie-making style to portraiture and asked:
"Can a Palestinian girl get her portrait painted? Or do we have to include
an Israeli girl also in order to justify the existence of a Palestinian
girl? I think not."
"Miral" is not without its Jewish supporters. The dovish Israel lobby J
Street defended Schnabel and Harvey Weinstein, whose Weinstein Company is
distributing the film. J Street issued a statement saying that it opposes
"any efforts to limit 'Miral's' distribution, as we would with any artistic
effort to tell the important Israeli-Palestinian story from either people's
perspectives." BoomGen Studios, a company doing publicity for the film,
issued a press release touting J Street's statement, and also support for
the film by Jewish Voice for Peace and American Jews for a Just Peace, two
groups that are fiercely critical of Israel and far outside the mainstream
of the Jewish community.
Rabbi Irwin Kula, president of CLAL-The National Jewish Center for Learning
and Leadership, spoke highly of "Miral" when he took part in the panel
discussion following the U.N. event. Kula, who will host a post-screening
conversation with the filmmakers on March 31 at Manhattan's 92nd Street Y,
told the Forward that the opposition to the film is indicative of how
"Israel has become the third rail in American Jewish life" and how "the
conflict has crowded out human stories."
Schnabel, a painter, originally made a name for himself in New York's art
scene. He went on to a successful career in film, with his biopics of the
artist Jean-Michel Basquiat ("Basquiat") and the magazine editor
Jean-Dominique Bauby, who was left paralyzed after a massive stroke ("Diving
Bell").
His investment in his latest project has become profoundly personal. First
he fell in love with Jebreal's novel, then he fell in love with its author.
The two met, back in 2007, in Rome, where she was working as a television
anchorwoman and his artwork was the subject of a retrospective. As they tell
it, Schnabel approached Jebreal at a party and inquired into her ethnic
background; the two struck up a conversation, during which he asked to read
something she had written. She sent him a copy of "Miral," and within a few
months they were working together to adapt the story for the big screen. The
collaboration sparked a romance between the American Jewish director, who
was married at the time, and the Palestinian Muslim journalist, the single
mother of a daughter, Miral, now 14.
Jebreal, who said she admires Israeli authors David Grossman and Amos Oz,
and draws inspiration from the Italian Jewish writer Primo Levi's account of
his year at Auschwitz, said "Miral," though written as a novel, is
essentially her own story: Like her character, she was sent to live at the
Arab Children's House at age 5, after her mother committed suicide by
walking into the sea; she was raised by Hind al-Husseini, the Palestinian
woman who founded the orphanage, and by her pious father, whom she would
visit on weekends. Eventually, she earned a scholarship to study in Italy.
Even now, at age 37, a successful journalist and the author of three books,
Jebreal said she often feels "uncomfortable admitting to being Palestinian"
because of prejudices in the West. "One of the reasons I'm proud and happy
this movie is here is that it will break some of those taboos about who are
the others, who are the Palestinians - and see them as humans," she said.
Schnabel said that the process of making the film, shot in Israel and the
West Bank, exposed him to different perspectives on the conflict and gave
him a greater understanding of the history and lived experiences of the
Palestinians. He explained, for example, that growing up, he had heard all
about the deadly 1948 Arab attack on the Jewish doctors and nurses en route
to Jerusalem's Hadassah Hospital; but it wasn't until he read "Miral" that
he heard about the massacre of Arab villagers at Deir Yassin, which took
place just four days earlier.
"Jean Renoir said that the problem with the world is that everybody's got
their reasons," Schnabel said, during the interview at Palazzo Chupi.
"There's no reason good enough for a child to die, whether it's an Israeli
child or a Palestinian child. And the insanity of what's going on over there
just has to stop and people, nonviolent people, have to have a revolution,
and they have to stop accepting the logic of fanatics on both sides. I mean
they have to get rid of their leaders. You can't follow Hamas, and you can't
follow Bibi Netanyahu. These people are nuts, all of them."
Even if he's not keen on the current Israeli government or its policies,
Schnabel said that like his parents before him, he cares deeply about the
future of the state. "My mother drove my father crazy selling youth aliyah
tickets and trying to build a tree in Israel or getting things for the
Hadassah Hospital," he told the crowd gathered at the U.N. screening. "She
really believed in this utopic democratic place - and I do too. But it can't
exist like this. I think the settlements are an absolute impossibility."
"Miral" opens March 25 in New York and Los Angeles, and the Weinstein
Company is trying to capitalize on the controversy. A full-page ad for the
film in The New York Times, featuring a drawing of the movie's protagonist
staring through barbed wire shaped into a Star of David, bills "Miral" as
"the movie they tried to stop."
The Weinstein Company did not return a call seeking comment.
Contact Gabrielle Birkner at birkner@forward.com
Read more: http://forward.com/articles/136436/#ixzz1IUImQvQV
<http://forward.com/articles/136436/>
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "World_Politics" group.
To post to this group, send email to world_politics@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to world_politics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/world_politics?hl=en.
From: ShunkW <shunkw@sbcglobal.net>
Date: Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 12:25 AM
Subject: The Man Behind 'Miral' Defends His Work, and No One Stopped Him
To: ShunkW <shunkw@sbcglobal.net>
The Man Behind 'Miral' Defends His Work, and No One Stopped Him
GETTY IMAGES
Star Power: Julian Schnabel with Freida Pinto, who appears in the film.
By Gabrielle Birkner
Published March 23, 2011, issue of April 01, 2011
<http://forward.com/issues/2011-04-01/> .
* Print <javascript:window.print();>
* Email <javascript:openwindow()>
* Share <http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php>
* Author Archive <http://forward.com/authors/gabrielle-birkner/>
* Community News <http://forward.com/sections/community-news/>
As a young boy, Julian Schnabel accompanied his parents to a grand Broadway
theater to see a screening of "Exodus" - the 1960 melodrama that depicts the
founding of the state of Israel. During a scene in which Jewish refugees
launch into a celebratory rendition of "Hatikvah," Schnabel recalls how
moviegoers, his family included, leapt to their feet, put their hands over
their hearts and sang along.
"Every time there was a battle, and certainly during the Six Day War, I was
absolutely thrilled that the Israelis won," Schnabel, the painter and
Academy Award-nominated director of the 2007 film "The Diving Bell and the
Butterfly," said in a recent interview.
The "Exodus" narrative on which Schnabel was raised, as the son of a
Hadassah chapter president, exists in sharp contrast to the one that he
presents in his latest film, "Miral." The movie is based on the
autobiographical novel by Schnabel's girlfriend, Rula Jebreal. The film's
title character is a motherless Palestinian girl, growing up in an East
Jerusalem orphanage and coming of age during the first intifada.
"Miral" is dedicated "to everyone on both sides who still believe peace is
possible." Yet the Israelis depicted onscreen - soldiers bulldozing homes
and countering rock-throwing with machine-gun fire, wardens whipping
political prisoners and settlers building homes in Arab population centers
because, as one character puts it, "what they really want is all of
Palestine" - don't necessarily come across as the peace-seeking sort.
The film garnered criticism from some of Israel's supporters in advance of
its March 14 screening at the hall of the United Nations General Assembly.
Haim Waxman, Israel's deputy ambassador to the U.N., asked the General
Assembly's president, Joseph Deiss, to reconsider the decision to host the
screening. So too did David Harris, executive director of the American
Jewish Committee.
Related
* The Most Important Nazi Film They Didn't Let You See
<http://forward.com/articles/131713/>
* Hollywood Hath No Fury Like a Jewish State Scorned
<http://forward.com/articles/103334/>
* Elliot Spitzer, Copyright Infringer?
<http://blogs.forward.com/campaign-confidential/4237/>
"The film has a clear political message, which portrays Israel in a highly
negative light," Harris wrote in a March 13 letter to Deiss. "Permit me to
ask you why the President of the General Assembly would wish to associate
himself - and the prestige of the office - with such a blatantly one-sided
event."
The day after the screening, which went on as planned, Rabbi Marvin Hier of
the Simon Wiesenthal Center said in a statement that the screening marked
"another sad day in the 63-year-old history of the U.N.'s bias against the
state of Israel."
In an interview conducted in a conference room of Palazzo Chupi - the
hot-pink West Village, Manhattan apartment building that Schnabel developed
and calls home - the filmmaker weighed in on what he thinks is behind the
allegations that "Miral" is anti-Israel.
"Maybe it's the simple fact that a high-profile film written by a
Palestinian is cause enough for Jewish opprobrium," said Schnabel, who
arrived wearing what has become a signature uniform: plaid shirt, pajama
bottoms and sunglasses. "Maybe it's because the director of the film, Julian
Schnabel, is Jewish, and his commitment to any perspective other than the
Jewish paradigm is akin to tribal and national betrayal."
Schnabel has insisted that the making of "Miral" was always an artistic
endeavor - never an attempt to encapsulate the entire Arab-Israeli conflict.
"I'm not a politician, and I'm not a historian, and I know that there are
lots of other stories that can be told," the 59-year-old artist and
filmmaker said during a panel discussion that followed the U.N. screening.
"But I thought I'd just try to tell this story - and it's about a family.
And my goal was... to see if the audience could care about these
characters."
Implicitly taking on those who say the film fails to present both sides of
the conflict, he compared his movie-making style to portraiture and asked:
"Can a Palestinian girl get her portrait painted? Or do we have to include
an Israeli girl also in order to justify the existence of a Palestinian
girl? I think not."
"Miral" is not without its Jewish supporters. The dovish Israel lobby J
Street defended Schnabel and Harvey Weinstein, whose Weinstein Company is
distributing the film. J Street issued a statement saying that it opposes
"any efforts to limit 'Miral's' distribution, as we would with any artistic
effort to tell the important Israeli-Palestinian story from either people's
perspectives." BoomGen Studios, a company doing publicity for the film,
issued a press release touting J Street's statement, and also support for
the film by Jewish Voice for Peace and American Jews for a Just Peace, two
groups that are fiercely critical of Israel and far outside the mainstream
of the Jewish community.
Rabbi Irwin Kula, president of CLAL-The National Jewish Center for Learning
and Leadership, spoke highly of "Miral" when he took part in the panel
discussion following the U.N. event. Kula, who will host a post-screening
conversation with the filmmakers on March 31 at Manhattan's 92nd Street Y,
told the Forward that the opposition to the film is indicative of how
"Israel has become the third rail in American Jewish life" and how "the
conflict has crowded out human stories."
Schnabel, a painter, originally made a name for himself in New York's art
scene. He went on to a successful career in film, with his biopics of the
artist Jean-Michel Basquiat ("Basquiat") and the magazine editor
Jean-Dominique Bauby, who was left paralyzed after a massive stroke ("Diving
Bell").
His investment in his latest project has become profoundly personal. First
he fell in love with Jebreal's novel, then he fell in love with its author.
The two met, back in 2007, in Rome, where she was working as a television
anchorwoman and his artwork was the subject of a retrospective. As they tell
it, Schnabel approached Jebreal at a party and inquired into her ethnic
background; the two struck up a conversation, during which he asked to read
something she had written. She sent him a copy of "Miral," and within a few
months they were working together to adapt the story for the big screen. The
collaboration sparked a romance between the American Jewish director, who
was married at the time, and the Palestinian Muslim journalist, the single
mother of a daughter, Miral, now 14.
Jebreal, who said she admires Israeli authors David Grossman and Amos Oz,
and draws inspiration from the Italian Jewish writer Primo Levi's account of
his year at Auschwitz, said "Miral," though written as a novel, is
essentially her own story: Like her character, she was sent to live at the
Arab Children's House at age 5, after her mother committed suicide by
walking into the sea; she was raised by Hind al-Husseini, the Palestinian
woman who founded the orphanage, and by her pious father, whom she would
visit on weekends. Eventually, she earned a scholarship to study in Italy.
Even now, at age 37, a successful journalist and the author of three books,
Jebreal said she often feels "uncomfortable admitting to being Palestinian"
because of prejudices in the West. "One of the reasons I'm proud and happy
this movie is here is that it will break some of those taboos about who are
the others, who are the Palestinians - and see them as humans," she said.
Schnabel said that the process of making the film, shot in Israel and the
West Bank, exposed him to different perspectives on the conflict and gave
him a greater understanding of the history and lived experiences of the
Palestinians. He explained, for example, that growing up, he had heard all
about the deadly 1948 Arab attack on the Jewish doctors and nurses en route
to Jerusalem's Hadassah Hospital; but it wasn't until he read "Miral" that
he heard about the massacre of Arab villagers at Deir Yassin, which took
place just four days earlier.
"Jean Renoir said that the problem with the world is that everybody's got
their reasons," Schnabel said, during the interview at Palazzo Chupi.
"There's no reason good enough for a child to die, whether it's an Israeli
child or a Palestinian child. And the insanity of what's going on over there
just has to stop and people, nonviolent people, have to have a revolution,
and they have to stop accepting the logic of fanatics on both sides. I mean
they have to get rid of their leaders. You can't follow Hamas, and you can't
follow Bibi Netanyahu. These people are nuts, all of them."
Even if he's not keen on the current Israeli government or its policies,
Schnabel said that like his parents before him, he cares deeply about the
future of the state. "My mother drove my father crazy selling youth aliyah
tickets and trying to build a tree in Israel or getting things for the
Hadassah Hospital," he told the crowd gathered at the U.N. screening. "She
really believed in this utopic democratic place - and I do too. But it can't
exist like this. I think the settlements are an absolute impossibility."
"Miral" opens March 25 in New York and Los Angeles, and the Weinstein
Company is trying to capitalize on the controversy. A full-page ad for the
film in The New York Times, featuring a drawing of the movie's protagonist
staring through barbed wire shaped into a Star of David, bills "Miral" as
"the movie they tried to stop."
The Weinstein Company did not return a call seeking comment.
Contact Gabrielle Birkner at birkner@forward.com
Read more: http://forward.com/articles/136436/#ixzz1IUImQvQV
<http://forward.com/articles/136436/>
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "World_Politics" group.
To post to this group, send email to world_politics@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to world_politics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/world_politics?hl=en.
--
Palash Biswas
Pl Read:
http://nandigramunited-banga.blogspot.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment