The intriguing, disclosing and at many festivals screened and award-winning film Incitement directed by Yaron Zilberman will not have its Croatian premiere at the open-air edition of the 14th Festival of Tolerance. Bad weather prevented its screening not once, but twice, but given the fact that this is an exceptional title, the Festival of Tolerance has not given up on it. Quite the contrary!
We intend to wait for new and better circumstances and screen it in an atmosphere and context this outstanding film deserves.
Incitement portrays one of the most shocking events in Israeli history, which has completely changed the Israeli society, according to the Israeli ambassador Ilan Mor:
“The lesson of this tragic event, of this trauma, is something the Israeli society has not yet fully apprehended. As a society and as individuals we still have a long way to go before we learn and apply the lessons. Israel is a young state still trying to find its identity – a country consisting of Jewish immigrants from all over the world who brought with them different histories, different culture, different traditions. Many issues are still open to debate in Israel, one of them being the relationship between secular and orthodox Jews. Israel is the only Jewish country in the world and as such focuses on the preservation of our Jewish culture and heritage. But at the same time it is a modern state which has adopted the international values of democracy, equality, freedom of speech. These two truths need to find a way to coexist and that is the essence of building and shaping our society.”
Director Zilberman in Incitement successfully combines live action parts with archive materials. He doesn’t shy away from including TV news reports and documentary scenes into his essentially fiction film, which gives it on the overall a high level of authenticity. At the same time, all these directorial procedures testify to his high level of skill and cinematic prowess in general. The portrayal of Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination from the point of view of the assassinator is in this film particularly valuable because, sharing all the aspects of the assassinator’s radicalisation, it paints a layered character image whose tiniest details depict the pieces of the puzzle called a criminal mind.
