By Michael Regenstreif
The remarkable documentary film Jerusalem, now playing at the IMAX theatre at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, is a visually stunning and compelling portrait of the city. The movie gracefully captures and explains the central religious and historic importance of the city to Jews, to Christians and to Muslims.
Director Daniel Ferguson and his team negotiated unprecedented access from government and religious authorities to take their state-of-the-art cameras into the streets and markets, to the skies in what is normally a no-fly zone, and to holy sites such as the Western Wall, the Dome of the Rock and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Seeing the sights so vividly captured in ultra-high definition on the IMAX domed screen is simply breathtaking.
Almost all of the short film – it flies by in less than 45 minutes – takes place in the very small area of the Old City. Using the narration of British actor Benedict Cumberbatch and commentary by American archeologist Jodi Magness, the film summarizes and explains Jerusalem’s rich biblical-era history and the hows and whys of its centrality to each of the three monotheistic religions.
We see Jews praying at the Kotel, Christians re-enacting Jesus’ final journey along the Via Dolorosa on Good Friday, and Muslims at prayer at the Dome of the Rock. To experience the marketplace with its Arab merchants and backgammon players via the film is as vivid as it can be without actually being there.
At the heart of Jerusalem are the people and the very distinct communities who live there, and we meet them through three articulate teenage girls who have lived in Jerusalem all of their lives and whose families have deep roots in the city: Revital Zacharie, a Jewish Israeli; Nadia Tadros, a Christian; and Farah Ammouri, a Muslim Arab.
Each of the girls – who, on the surface, seem so much alike – offers a tour of her Jerusalem, her Old City. They take us to some of the same places and introduce us to their families, and to some of the traditions that define their lives. They talk passionately and poignantly, and one never gets the sense that their individual visions of Jerusalem would exclude the other two.
But the fact emerges that these three girls – each eminently likable – are strangers to each other.
Each of them understands the importance of Jerusalem to her own religious narrative, and to her own community, but none of them knows very much about why Jerusalem is so important to the others. Each of the three has spent her life walking the same streets and living so close to the others without the opportunity to meet.
It would seem the kind of exchanges we see in Ottawa, when Grade 6 students at the Ottawa Jewish Community School have fun and share educational experiences with their Muslim and Christian counterparts at Charles H. Hulse Public School, or when Temple Israel invites Christians and Muslims to an interfaith Sukkot celebration, don’t happen in Jerusalem.
As much as I loved, and was inspired, watching Jerusalem – I highly recommend it and plan to see it again while it’s here at the Museum over the next six months – I felt sad as the movie ended and one of the girls says, “I hope, one day, we can have the courage to meet the people who are living right next to us.”
After the lights came up at the press screening, I asked Daniel Ferguson if the three girls had a chance to meet and interact during the filming. He told me they were brought together at one point, but that each felt too bound up in the history of her own narrative to interact successfully with the others.
Perhaps, now that the film has been completed, they will have the chance to see it, to glimpse inside each other’s worlds – in such close proximity to their own – and begin to find out how much they have in common. That was Ferguson’s hope. And mine, too.
No comments:
Post a Comment