AVIVA-BERLIN.de im November 2024 - Beitrag vom 07.10.2010


Jaffa - The Orange´s Clockwork. A thought-provoking film by Israeli director Eyal Sivan
Jennifer Gallagher

When you say "Jaffa", you think of "orange". On 14 October 2010, Eyal Sivan´s latest documentary will unpeel the Jaffa to reveal the true story behind the world´s most famous fruit ...

... at a cinema near you!


Most of us have eaten Jaffa oranges from Israel, they are sweet and almost seedless, and have a fragrance and taste that evokes an exotic land in the Middle East. And that´s about all that most of us know. However, after seeing Eyal Sivan´s excellent latest film, "Jaffa – The Orange´s Clockwork", your experience of eating a Jaffa orange will never be the same again!

The film is a moving and critical, yet balanced, multi-layered political essay that unpeels the complicated and untold story of the invention of the world´s most famous fruit that originated in Palestine in the mid-19th century and was named after the sea port of Jaffa, where it was first produced for export.

Using extraordinary archive footage, Eyal Sivan´s documentary shows the Arab-Jewish life in Palestine before the founding of Israel in 1948, how the cooperation in growing and exporting the Jaffa orange was seen as a symbol of positive Arab-Jewish relations. But while the Jaffa orange became the symbol of the State of Israel and of Zionist enterprise, for Palestinians it symbolises the loss and destruction of their homeland. .

The film offers a joint narrative by both intellectual and non-intellectual Israelis and Palestinians: for example: businessmen and workers from the citrus industry - poet, journalist, curator, historian and artist. They remember and reflect by carefully looking at unique archive material with us, the audience: old photos, early film-footage, commercials, political posters, and art incorporating the orange.

Slowly and thoroughly, the film explores and analyses Jewish-Arab life in Palestine before 1948, colonial jealousy and intervention, visual marketing propaganda and Western Christian Zionist myths about the Holy Land and the Orient and at the same time, how a legend was systematically created.

AVIVA-Tipp: By telling the surprising, sobering and to some, shocking, untold story "Jaffa – The Orange´s Clockwork", will surely encourage a brand of hope for the future and help to redefine Jewish existence based on Palestinian rights.

Director: Eyal Sivan, is a documentary filmmaker and essayist, who is currently co-leader of the MA program in Film, video and new media at the school of Humanities and social sciences, at the University of East London (UEL). Born 1964 in Haifa, Israel, he grew up in Jerusalem, and after working as a professional fashion photographer in Tel-Aviv he left Israel in 1985 and settled in Paris. Since then he worked in Europe and in Israel. Sivan directed more then ten worldwide awarded political documentaries and produced many others. Sivan publishes and lectures on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, documentary filmmaking and ethics, political crimes representation, political use of memory, as well as genocide and representation.
He is the founder and artistic director of the Paris-based documentary films production company Momento! and the film distribution agency Scalpel.
Sivan is the founder and editor-in-chief of "South Cinema Notebooks" - a journal of cinema and political critic edited by the Sapir academic college in Israel and member of the editorial board of the Paris-based publishing house "La Fabrique" as well as of the French social and political studies journal De l´autre Côté".
(Internet source: Eyal Sivan´s Website: www.eyalsivan.info

Filmography
Jaffa - the clockwork´s orange (2009)
Citizens K. (2007)
Route 181: Fragments of a Journey in Palestine-Israel (2004)
I Love You All (2004)
The Specialist (1999)
Itsembatsemba: Rwanda One Genocide Later (1996)
Aqabat-Jaber, Peace with no Return? (1995)
Izkor: Slaves of Memory (1991)

Jaffa - The Orange´s Clockwork
Belgium, Gemany, France, Israel
Directed by: Eyal Sivan
Producer: Osnat Trabelsi, Arik Bernstein
Genre: Documentary
Year of production: 2009
Dolby Digital
Length: 88 mins
Languages: Hebrew, Arabic, English, French
Subtitles: German