this week in film and television

THE MAGNIFICENT MEYERSONS

Kate Mulgrew and Barbara Barrie play mother and daughter in NYC-set The Magnificent Meyersons

THE MAGNIFICENT MEYERSONS (Evan Oppenheimer, 2021)
Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan
334 Amsterdam Ave. at West Seventy-Sixth St.
On demand: August 20-26, $15
Rooftop screenings with Q&As: August 22 & 24, $15, 8:00
argotpictures.com

The dysfunctional Manhattan family in Evan Oppenheimer’s new drama The Magnificent Meyersons might not be quite as quirky and off the beaten path as the off-the-wall dysfunctional NYC clan in Wes Anderson’s dark-comedy cult favorite The Royal Tenenbaums, but the trials and tribulations of brothers, sisters, and mothers in each are set in motion by a long-absent father.

Available on demand August 20-26 from the Marlene Meyerson JCC in addition to a pair of in-person rooftop screenings on August 22 and 24 featuring Q&As with writer-director Oppenheimer and several of the stars, The Magnificent Meyersons consists of a series of two-character discussions, examining love and loss, responsibility and faith, until the family ultimately comes together to face some hard truths. Oldest daughter Daphne (Jackie Burns) and her husband, Alan (Greg Keller), talk about whether they want more than one child; later, Daphne examines her career with friend and publishing colleague Joelle (Kate MacCluggage). Oldest son Roland (Ian Kahn), a successful businessman, shares his bleak pessimism about the state of the world with his finance pal Percy (T. Slate Gray). Youngest son Daniel (Daniel Eric Gold), who is studying to become a rabbi, delves into the existence of a supreme being first with his friend Lily (Lilli Stein), then with Father Joe (Neal Huff).

Youngest daughter Susie (Shoshannah Stern), a rising real estate agent, meets with her girlfriend, Tammy (Lauren Ridloff), in a cafe. And the siblings’ mother, Dr. Terri Meyerson (Kate Mulgrew), an oncologist, goes for a walk with her mother, the widowed Celeste (Barbara Barrie). Seen in flashbacks is Terri’s husband and the kids’ father, Morty (Richard Kind), who left the family he loves decades ago for a hard-to-explain reason involving his mental well-being. He has been missing from their lives ever since, though his psychological presence hovers over everyone.

Oppenheimer (A Little Game, Alchemy) avoids making heroes or villains, culprits or victims out of any of his characters; they are all complex individuals who, above all else, have ordinary problems over the course of an ordinary day. One of the concepts that is central to the narrative is that no one is special and that nothing is extraordinary; in fact, a major event, breaking news that pings across the city (and the world), does not create the impact one would expect. It’s just another thing in people’s lives.

Several of the subplots go nowhere, including one involving Roland’s wife, Ilaria (Melissa Errico), and their daughter, Stefania (Talia Oppenheimer, Evan’s daughter), or are unfulfilling. Most of the action takes place in and around Union Square Park, City Hall Park, and other familiar outdoor locations, with repetitive drone shots introducing new scenes. Oppenheimer seems to go out of his way to make sure nothing of too much consequence ever happens; even when Dr. Meyerson tells a couple that their young child has only three months to live, the father refuses to accept it, and Terri can only watch, offering nothing further. Don’t expect fireworks, because you’re not going to get them. Even when confrontation appears to be inevitable, when the finale tosses yet one more twist at us, Oppenheimer does not even try to close it all up neatly. It’s just another average day for an average family in a grand city.

“Why would a reviewer make the point of saying someone’s not a genius? Do you especially think I’m not a genius?” Eli Cash (Owen Wilson) says over the phone in The Royal Tenenbaums, which is a work of genius. “You didn’t even have to think about it, did you?” The same can be said about the characters in The Magnificent Meyersons.

ON BROADWAY

Sir Ian McKellen waxes poetic about Broadway in Oren Jacoby’s documentary

ON BROADWAY (Oren Jacoby, 2019)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Opens Friday, August 20
quadcinema.com

As Broadway prepares to reopen in a big way in September following a year and a half of a pandemic lockdown that shuttered all forty-one theaters, Oren Jacoby’s documentary arrives like a love letter to the recent past, present, and future of the Great White Way (so named for its lights and illuminated marquees). “Without the theater, New York somehow would not be itself,” Sir Ian McKellen says near the beginning of On Broadway, which opens August 20 at the Quad and will have a special rooftop screening September 1 outside at the Marlene Meyerson JCC. “Live theater can change your life,” he adds near the end. Both lines appear to apply to how the city is coming back to life even as the Covid-19 Delta variant keeps spreading, but the film is nearly two years old, having made its New York City debut in November 2019 at DOC NYC.

On Broadway is a bit all over the place as it traces the history of Broadway from the near-bankrupt doldrums of 1969-72 to its rebirth in the 1980s and 1990s as a commercial force while also following Richard Bean’s UK import The Nap as it prepares to open September 27 at MTC’s Samuel J. Friedlander Theatre. I was a big fan of The Nap, calling it “a jolly good time . . . a tense and very funny crime thriller” in my review. Jacoby speaks with Bean, director Daniel Sullivan, and star Alexandra Billings, the transgender actor playing transgender character Waxy Bush. The behind-the-scenes look at the play, which was taking a big risk, lacking any big names and set in the world of professional snooker, is the best part of the film and it deserved more time instead of focusing on how such innovators as Stephen Sondheim, Bob Fosse, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Mike Nichols, and Michael Bennett helped turn around Broadway’s misfortunes with such popular shows as Pippin, Chicago, A Chorus Line, Annie, Evita, Cats, Amadeus, and Nicholas Nickleby, ultimately leading to Rent, Angels in America, and Hamilton. But Broadway still found room for August Wilson’s ten-play Pittsburgh Cycle.

The film explores how spectacle, celebrity, and extravaganza began ruling the day, at the expense of new American plays. “This could be a business,” Disney head Michael Eisner remembers thinking; his company bought a theater and produced such hits as Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, which attracted families paying exorbitant ticket prices and going home with plenty of merch. Jacoby speaks with Sidney Baumgarten and Rebecca Robertson, who were involved in transforming Times Square from a haven for addicts, hookers, and porn shops to a place where parents could bring their kids to see a show. “We’re like Las Vegas now,” Tony-winning director Jack O’Brien laments.

Among the many other theater people sharing their love of Broadway — as well as their concerns — are John Lithgow, George C. Wolfe, Alec Baldwin, Helen Mirren, Tommy Tune, Hal Prince, Cameron Mackintosh, James Corden, Nicholas Hytner, David Henry Hwang, Oskar Eustis, and Hugh Jackman. “In the theater, you have to be present. You have to be present as an artist, and you have to be present as an audience member, for the experience to really happen,” Emmy, Tony, and Obie winner Christine Baranski says, evoking what it feels like as we wait for Broadway to reopen this fall. “And when you see a great performance, it is a spiritual experience.”

Jacoby, whose previous works include Shadowman, Master Thief: Art of the Heist, and My Italian Secret: The Forgotten Heroes, will be at the Quad for Q&As at the 7:00 screenings on August 20 and 21. But it’s Sardi’s maître d’ Gianni Felidi who gets to the heart of it all. “This is what Broadway’s about,” he says. “Great theater is a mirror to the human condition, to us, to people, and how we’re really all the same despite our differences, our perceived differences; be it if we’re from a different race, a different gender, a different sexual orientation, we’re really all the same. And that’s what theater shows us.”

THE MEANING OF HITLER

New documentary delves into who Adolf Hitler was and how he rose to power, with rare color footage

THE MEANING OF HITLER (Michael Tucker & Petra Epperlein, 2021)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave.
Opens Friday, August 13
www.ifccenter.com

“Has history lost all meaning?” a narrator asks in The Meaning of Hitler. “Is it possible to make a film like this without contributing to the expansion of the Nazi cinematic universe?”

Over the last several decades, the word “Nazi” has been used as a derogatory comment not only for mean-spirited people who enforce their own bizarre rules — think Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi character — but also when political figures don’t like what they believe to be controlling legislation and ideals from a rival party (see Marjorie Taylor Greene). As the word begins to lose its historical reference and becomes normalized — the Nazis are responsible for the senseless, brutal murder of more than thirteen million people, which is anything but normal — so does the name of the man who was the leader of the National Socialists, Adolf Hitler. But the current rise of antisemitism, the election victories of far-right candidates around the world, and the inability of the populace to see through the shady veneer of these demagogues drove husband-and-wife documentarians Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein to make The Meaning of Hitler. You probably have seen a lot of films about the Holocaust, but not one like this, which delves into who Hitler was, what made him that way, and how we can prevent another similar personality from taking power.

Tucker and Epperlein use Sebasian Haffner’s 1978 book of the same name as a guide as they follow Hitler’s trajectory, from his childhood home, to his failure as an artist, to his first, unsuccessful coup attempt, to his successful march to domination. Do we need more books and films about Hitler? “Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about Hitler is how he resists understanding. There is not one historian, apart from Haffner, who claims to understand him,” says author Martin Amis. “Our understanding of Hitler is central to understanding ourselves. It’s a reckoning you have to make if you’re a serious person.” Professor Yehuda Bauer opines, “You cannot put Hitler on a psychologist’s couch,” while professor Saul Friedländer wishes the filmmakers “Good luck,” intimating that trying to figure out Hitler is a lost cause.

But try they do. In chapters such as “Chaos,” “Legend,” “Hitler Had No Friends,” “The Orator,” “The Hitler Cult,” and “The Good Nazi Years,” taken from Shaffner’s short volume, Tucker and Epperlein travel to Hitler’s ancestral village, the Berlin bunker where he killed himself, Vienna, his Wolf’s Lair headquarters, Flanders, Munich, Berchtesgarden (where Hitler “vacationed” for important photo opportunities), Paris, Warsaw, and Israel, locations where Hitler either lived, visited, or had a major impact on as he utilized the media to spread his message of hate. Forensic biologist Dr. Mark Benecke talks about his examination of Hitler’s skull fragments. Audio guru Klaus Heyne discusses how a new microphone, which became known as the Hitler Bottle, allowed the führer to shout out to impossibly large, adoring crowds, comparing it to the Beatles at Shea Stadium. Archaeologist Wojciech Mazurek describes how they will be digging at the former location of the Sobibor death camp, known as the Unknowable Spot, in order to account for the victims of the Nazis.

The filmmakers (Gunner Palace, Karl Marx City), who wrote, directed, edited, and produced the documentary, with Tucker serving as cinematographer and sound designer as well, give ample time to Holocaust denier David Irving, who offers tours of Nazi sites, celebrating Hitler; while claiming he is not antisemitic, he makes several slurs on camera. He adds, “Forget about Auschwitz; it’s unimportant.” They also speak with professor Deborah Lipstadt, who was sued by Irving for libel but won the court case.

Among the others who share their thoughts on Hitler and the Nazis are Dr. Peter Theiss-Abendroth, historian Sir Richard Evans, author Francine Prose, professor and sociologist Klaus Theweleit, and Nazi hunters Beate and Serge Klarsfeld; they don’t paint a pretty picture, which is how curator Sarah Forgey describes Hitler’s artwork.

Throughout the film, there are short clips of how Hitler and the Nazis have been portrayed in cinema, including scenes from Mel Brooks’s The Producers — yes, “Springtime for Hitler” — The Bunker, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be, Hitler: Dead or Alive, Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will, and others. But it takes a critical turn when the focus shifts to the current wave of nationalism, anti-immigration, online radicalization, and public demonstrations, particularly related to Donald Trump and the United States. The historians are quite clear about how Trump uses the Hitler playbook in his rhetoric and actions. Professor Ute Frevert notes about Hitler, “It’s consent. He never found anybody who objected. They all said, ‘Well, we believe you. We trust you. We love you,’” which echoes not just how Trump’s cult unconditionally support the former president but what the former TV reality show host said about the rioters who stormed the US Capitol on January 6. And Dr. Mathias Irlinger warns us, “Every year, lots of people come [to Berchtesgarden] because they still believe in Hitler, they still believe in Nazi ideology. The discussion ‘How to deal with the history’ will never stop.”

The revision, whitewashing, and erasure of so much history is why films like The Meaning of Hitler must continue to be made, especially as the last generation of Holocaust survivors and witnesses pass away. If we don’t figure out “What made Hitler Hitler?,” as the film asks, how can we say it will never happen again, even in our own backyard?

THE STAIRS

Friends encounter unspeakable horror while hiking in the woods in The Stairs

THE STAIRS (Peter “Drago” Tiemann, 2021)
AMC Kips Bay 15, 570 Second Ave.
Regal Union Square 14, 850 Broadway
AMC Empire 25, 234 West Forty-Second St.
Thursday, August 12, 7:00
www.fathomevents.com

“People go missing during a blood moon,” a convenience store clerk tells two men about to go hiking in the woods in Peter “Drago” Tiemann’s grisly thriller The Stairs, a Fathom/Cinedigm one-time-only event screening in select theaters on August 12 at 7:00. If it reminds you of the warning the truck driver (Joe Belcher) gives Jack (Griffin Dunne) and David (David Naughton) in John Landis’s An American Werewolf in London — “Boys, keep off the moors. Stick to the roads, and best of luck” — well, you’re on the right track.

The film begins twenty years in the past, as a hunting sojourn with Grandpa Gene (The Dukes of Hazzard’s John Schneider) and his eleven-year-old grandson, Jesse (Thomas Wethington), goes bad when the boy finds a mysterious set of steps in the middle of the forest, harboring something evil. It quickly becomes apparent that it’s not exactly a stairway to heaven.

In the present, best bros Nick (Adam Korson) and Josh (Brent Bailey) are going camping with their friend Rebeccah (Stacey Oristano) and her new squeeze, Jordon (Tyra Colar), along with the unpredictable and wild Doug (Josh Crotty), who completely throws off the dynamic. After they encounter a strange, eerie couple (Karleena Gore and David S. Hogan), all hell breaks loose, as people start dying in brutally violent ways, with a fab supernatural twist.

A festival favorite, The Stairs is a stylish horror film in the manner of Eli Roth’s Cabin Fever, the original Friday the 13th, Drew Goddard’s Cabin in the Woods, Rob Schmidt’s Wrong Turn, and Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre; in homage, there are even brief cameos from a chainsaw and a lake. You’ll find yourself screaming at the screen as characters make bad choices while Tiemann, who wrote the movie with Jason L Lowe, gleefully exploits genre tropes. We should always listen to Bugs Bunny, who famously told a monster, “Don’t go up there — it’s dark!”

A mysterious evil stirs up trouble in The Stairs

The pandemic lockdown has kept most of us inside for a year and a half, avoiding movie theaters and camping with friends; after watching The Stairs, you might never go outside again. The film is being shown at AMC Kips Bay 15, Regal Union Square 14, and AMC Empire 25, with a prerecorded introduction by Oscar nominee Kathleen Quinlan (Apollo 13, The Doors), who plays Grandma Bernice; a discussion with longtime stunt coordinator Tiemann; and bonus content.

JOHN AND THE HOLE

Charlie Shotwell stars as a disenchanted teen with an unusual plan in John and the Hole

JOHN AND THE HOLE (Pascual Sisto, 2020)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Opens Friday, August 6
212-255-2243
quadcinema.com

You can add the thirteen-year-old title character of John and the Hole (Charlie Shotwell) to the cinematic list of creepy kids who do bad things, populated by such children on the edge as eight-year-old Rhoda Penmark (Patty McCormack) in The Bad Seed, Holland Perry (Martin Udvarnoky) in The Other, Ronald Wilby (Scott Jacoby) in Bad Ronald, and Rynn Jacobs (Jodie Foster) in The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane.

Adapted and expanded by Oscar-winning Argentinian writer Nicolás Giacobone from his 2010 short story “El Pozo” (“The Well”) and directed by Spanish visual artist Pascual Sisto, who previously teamed up on the 2003 short Océano, John and the Hole is a tense coming-of-age psychological thriller about a boy from a good family who commits a horrific act for no clear, apparent reason.

John lives in a lovely glass house in the woods with his successful parents, Brad (Michael C. Hall) and Anna (Jennifer Ehle), and his older sister, Laurie (Taissa Farmiga). When we first see them, it’s from outside their home, as they eat their dinner in silence, each off in their own world. It soon becomes clear that there’s something not quite right about John; he has trouble answering a math question at school, he lies about losing a drone, he kicks his skateboard down an incline and doesn’t go after it, and he drugs the sweet-natured gardener, Charles (Lucien Spellman).

The family seems to love him but understands that he’s different. It’s more than just teen angst or ennui, a spoiled child disenchanted with his privileged life. That becomes evident when, one night, he devises a plot involving his parents and sister and a mysterious underground bunker that was meant to be a safe place when it was constructed five years ago for an unrealized property. John goes on with his life, playing video games with his best friend, Peter (Ben O’Brien), continuing his tennis lessons, and trying to act like an adult, but he has a lot to learn. He remains distant even as his family suffers, growing more feral by the day.

Sisto (Steps) and Giacobone (Biutiful, Birdman) play with horror-movie tropes throughout the film. Early on, Brad says good night to John, suggesting he check under his bed, which is rarely a good thing. There’s a framing story between a mother, Lily (Samantha LeBretton), and her young daughter, Paula (Tamara Hickey), which reveals that the tale of John and his family might be a local legend while reenforcing the tenuous relationship between parents and children and who is responsible for whom. “Last month, John asked me something. It was a weird question,” Anna tells Brad. “He wanted to know what it’s like to be an adult. When do you stop being a kid?”

Brad (Michael C. Hall), Laurie (Taissa Farmiga), and Anna (Jennifer Ehle) play three characters in search of an exit in John and the Hole

Cinematographer Paul Özgür makes terrific use of Jacqueline Abrahams’s splendid production designer, topped off by composer Caterina Barbieri’s ominous electronic score. Sisto and Giacobone have referred to the film as Michael Haneke’s version of Home Alone; to that I would add Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Exit and Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes, in which people are trapped in utterly prosaic situations that are at the same time terrifyingly inexplicable.

Shotwell (All the Money in the World, Eli) is mesmerizing as John, fully embodying the enigma of a teenager creating his own self-imposed isolation, although he’s been lost in his mind for years. Six-time Emmy nominee Hall (Dexter, Lazarus), two-time Tony winner Ehle (The Real Thing, Saint Maude), and Farmiga (The Nun, The Bling Ring) are excellent as his confused family, wanting to help John but not knowing exactly what he wants and what to do. Like the best scary movies, there’s a constant undercurrent of fear about just how far John might go in his personal quest, right up to the very end.

THE MACALUSO SISTERS

Five siblings face a tragedy they cannot recover from in The Macaluso Sisters

THE MACALUSO SISTERS (Emma Dante, 2020)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Opens Friday, August 6
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

Emma Dante’s The Macaluso Sisters is a heart-wrenching tale that follows seventy years in the lives of five sisters in Palermo, Sicily, after they endure a horrific tragedy. The film begins in 1985, as the orphaned siblings prepare for a day at the beach, which they have to sneak onto because they can’t afford the admission fee. It is a chance for them to enjoy themselves and be free of their problems for an afternoon, much like the pastel-painted pigeons they raise and rent out for special occasions, from weddings to funerals. The oldest, eighteen-year-old Maria (played first by Eleonora De Luca, then Simona Malato), uses the escape to secretly share kisses with a young woman she is in love with as they set up an outdoor screening of Back to the Future.

Pinuccia (Anita Pomario, Donatella Finocchiaro, Ileana Rigano) spends much of her time in front of mirrors, putting on makeup and getting ready to attract men. Lia (Susanna Piraino, Serena Barone, Maria Rosaria Alati) is the most passionate and impulsive member of the family. Katia (Alissa Maria Orlando, Laura Giordani, Rosalba Bologna) is the chubby, imaginative one who embraces fantasy. And Antonella (Viola Pusateri) is the beloved baby of the close-knit group, cute and adorable, whom the rest dote over. Following a terrible accident, the four remaining sisters try to go on with their lives, but they are haunted by loss, literally and figuratively, some damaged beyond repair as the decades pass.

Written by Dante, Elena Stancanelli, and Giorgio Vasta based on Dante’s play Le sorelle Macaluso, the award-winning film is centered around the sisters’ home, which grows more ramshackle over time, representing their deteriorating psychological state. Dante (Via Castellana Bandiera, mPalermu) often trains the camera on the building’s yellowing facade, four floors with many windows, tiny terraces, and a rooftop extension where the pigeons live. Just like the birds always return, so do the surviving sisters, the sadness enveloping them, pain evident in their vacant eyes and aging bodies.

Dante has described the five siblings as parts of the same being, with Maria the brain, Pinuccia the skin, Lia the heart, Katia the stomach, and Antonella the lungs, each one necessary to maintain the whole; take away any single aspect and the body is in danger of failing. It is no coincidence that the middle-aged Maria works in a veterinary lab where she has to cut open animals and dispose of their internal organs, saving the heart in a plastic bag. Meanwhile, whenever the older Katia, the only one who develops some sort of life of her own and is in favor of selling the place, tries to go inside, her key won’t open the door, as if she is no longer welcome, the house aware of her intentions.

Antonella (Viola Pusateri) is the beloved youngest of the Macaluso sisters in elegiac film

The elegiac film is gorgeously photographed by Gherardo Gossi, capturing the beauty of the bright outdoors, filled with life and excitement, offset against the darkness of the family home, shadows everywhere. Occasionally one of the sisters looks through a hole in the wall they made as children, allowing them to see a sunny world that has eluded them. Throughout the film, Dante focuses on water, from the ocean to the bathtub where the young Antonella likes to play and the older Maria seeks respite.

Dante lingers on Maria more than the others; as a teenager, she dreams of becoming a dancer, her lithe, naked body alive with promise. But decades later, her once-wide eyes are tired, deep, dark circles dominating her face; as she soaks in a tub, we again see her naked body, but it lacks the vitality she previously reveled in, doomed to a different fate, not simply because of age but because she, like her sisters, have never been able to get over their loss. It’s like the fancy plate Antonella uses to feed the pigeons; when it breaks years later, Maria tries to glue it back together, but she cannot fill in all the cracks.

THE VIEWING BOOTH

Maia Levy is the unexpected subject of Ra’anan Alexandrowicz’s The Viewing Booth

THE VIEWING BOOTH (Ra’anan Alexandrowicz, 2020)
Museum of the Moving Image, Bartos Screening Room
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
August 6-15
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us

“There’s a lot for me to learn from your viewing,” Israeli filmmaker Ra’anan Alexandrowicz tells Jewish American college student Maia Levy before turning the camera on us in the ingenious documentary The Viewing Booth, running August 6-15 at the Museum of the Moving Image. The seventy-one-minute work developed out of an experiment Alexandrowicz was doing at Temple University in Philadelphia, individually filming a small group of young men and women watching internet video clips of interactions between Israelis and Palestinians in the occupied territories of the Gaza Strip; in previous films such as The Law in These Parts and The Inner Tour — both of which will also be shown at MoMI — the Jerusalem-born Alexandrowicz has made clear his support of the Palestinians in this conflict. But along the way, his focus switched specifically to Levy, whose thoughtful, careful evaluations of the scenes and acknowledgment of her pro-Israel bias are mesmerizing. We end up seeing far more of Levy’s captivating face and exploring eyes than the videos themselves as the film challenges the viewer to rethink how they experience politically charged videos.

The film takes place in a small studio at Temple, where Levy sits in a closed-off room with a large window; Alexandrowicz mans a table with two monitors and editing equipment that he adjusts as Levy observes the videos. The director cuts between shots of Levy’s face, the videos themselves, and him watching Levy on his monitors, occasionally speaking with her. Six months later, he invites Levy back so she can watch herself watching the videos and comment on that as well. It’s absolutely gripping studying Levy as she interprets and reinterprets the videos, some of which were posted by B’Tselem, the Jerusalem-based Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, whose mission is to end the occupation; others are from unidentified sources. Alexandrowicz does not give Levy any additional details about the clips, even though he knows more about some of them, instead letting her navigate the images as if she were home by herself, surfing the internet.

In one scene, a Palestinian boy hugs an Israeli soldier who gives him food. In another, a group of young men throw rocks at someone recording them from an apartment, unclear at first who is who. In a third, an Israeli soldier snatches a young Palestinian boy and a second soldier kicks the child. The majority of the film concentrates on a longer video of a masked Israeli military unit searching the home of a Palestinian family in the middle of the night, forcing the parents to wake up the children as rifles are pointed at them. Levy scrutinizes every detail of the video, wondering if it was staged, considering what was happening just off camera, thinking the boy might be lying when he gives a wrong name that his father quickly corrects.

Levy innately understands that she brings her own personal bias and mistrust of B’Tselem to her interpretation. “I view it from an objective point,” she says. “I don’t really get my information from it. The point is, these things do happen; whether they skew the filming and everything, it still does happen, it’s still there. Yeah, they probably play a lot with it, and there is a lot of bias and things and they don’t show you the whole picture, but, I guess it’s true to some extent. That’s what it seems like.” This questioning of what is real and what isn’t is intriguing to Alexandrowicz, a documentarian whose career has been spent making nonfiction films; Levy even notes that Alexandrowicz makes choices — subjects, edits, camera angles — that impact what people see and don’t see in his work.

In his 2018 essay “50 Years of Documentation: A Brief History of the Documentation of the Israeli Occupation,” Alexandrowicz writes, “After viewing hundreds of news reports, films, and online videos about this subject, I found myself asking: What has all this documentation achieved? What has been the documentation’s role in this tragic piece of history? Visual culture scholars have long argued that images do not merely depict reality; they also perform and create reality. Then what is the relationship between the audiovisual documentation of the Israeli Occupation and the reality it claims to portray? These questions have led me to a wider inquiry about the role that documentation practices play in shaping historical, political, and social issues.” The Viewing Booth might ostensibly be about Israelis and Palestinians, but it also illuminates the great divide in America as political affiliation appears to affect how we evaluate actual footage; it seems impossible to escape from the diametrically opposed analyses of the murder of George Floyd, the BLM protests, the January 6 insurrection, and a Catholic high school student’s interaction with a Native American man at a MAGA rally.

Recognizing that many people won’t even watch videos that they presuppose will contradict their belief system, Levy offers, “I think people are scared, that they don’t watch them because they’re scared that they’re going to change their minds about it. They’re going to be, like, Wow, this is bad, and maybe I’m not so pro-Israel as I thought I would be. I think if you accept reality, then these things don’t really make or break your viewpoints. I don’t think that this can really, like . . . they can be informative to some extent, but you have to be careful.”

Alexandrowicz was inspired to make the film by Virginia Woolf’s book Three Guineas One, which grew out of a letter she was responding to about how to prevent war; she begins by discussing the visual depiction of war in newspapers and magazines. “But besides these pictures of other people’s lives and minds — these biographies and histories — there are also other pictures — pictures of actual facts; photographs. Photographs, of course, are not arguments addressed to the reason; they are simply statements of fact addressed to the eye. But in that very simplicity there may be some help. Let us see then whether when we look at the same photographs we feel the same things.” As we’ve learned over these last few years, we most often see and feel what we want to see and feel despite watching the same exact nonfiction footage.

The Israeli title of The Viewing Booth is The Mirror, a much more apt name, as we put ourselves in Levy’s position, with all our inherent biases and fears, and hopefully look at ourselves to reflect on how we watch such videos, which generally come to us through social media algorithms that keep us in our preferred bubbles or from friends who think as we do, reinforcing our beliefs. “You are the viewer that I’ve been making these films for,” Alexandrowicz tells Levy. In the case of The Viewing Booth, that is not quite true; we are all the viewers he has made this film for.

Alexandrowicz will be at MoMI for a live conversation with film critic Alissa Wilkinson following the 7:00 screening on August 6, and he will be back for the 5:00 screening on August 8 with Levy. The Viewing Booth might not change your belief system, but it will change the way you experience online nonfiction video.