Life According to Agfa
Abie Nathan was so wrapped up in the Oslo euphoria that he sank his peace ship. McDonalds opened its first fast-food outlet in the country, and Starbucks soon followed. There was the new Israel, the new Middle East.
Assi commemorated the Rose Garden ceremony with a line of coke and a screenplay about two lovers, an Arab and a Jew, in the Galilee. The dystopian story ends with the Jewish state “going down the tubes.”
His aunt Reumah and President Ezer couldn’t make it to the premier of Assi’s Life According to Agfa (1993), considered by critics his best film. Ruth sat in the front row watching a film that ends in a bloodbath committed by a broken-legged IDF commander named Nimrod and his gang of soldiers in a seedy Tel Aviv bar named “Barbie,” Hebrew slang for a mental asylum.
The film has the dark, nihilistic violence of Taxi Driver coupled with the existentialist mood of Deer Hunter. In making it, drugged out Assi was a prophet on a mission, a mission described by his producer as a sort of futuristic nostalgia: “When the Zionist experience comes to an end, and we’re all living in Europe and all sorts of other places, I think that this film will express beautifully the existence we had here.” “It was this point in time in Israeli reality,” added an actress who played the barmaid in the film, “where it seemed like the end of the world was near, and we had come to warn people. We were sure we were headed for the end of the state, that a terrible disaster was looming; we felt we were doing something that went beyond a film.”
Shortly after the release of Assi’s follow-up film, An Electric Blanket named Moshe, he was arrested and hospitalized for psychiatric observation. Police accused him of splashing acid in their faces.
If Assi was the ideological gravedigger of Israel, Yael remained the pugnacious believer; and she knew that helping build a Palestinian state was the only way to prevent the Zionist dream of statehood, because of the settlements, from degenerating into an apartheid regime.
Along with a thousand Peace Now activists, she joined the PLO’s Jerusalem man Faisal Husseini, the son of the guerrilla leader Abdel Kader al-Husseini, on a march across the Green Line to the West Bank. The group held symbolic “peace talks” in a town just across the old Green Line. In response to a phalanx of army jeeps blocking their advance, Yael grabbed a mike and said in a strong, unhesitating voice, “Faisal Husseini’s father and my father fought each other to the death. Today I am proud to stand next to him in a peace meeting. I am sure that his children and mine will live, each in his own country, in peace. . . . I’m grateful they set up a roadblock. They’ve demarcated the border. This is not Greater Israel. . . . The State of Israel ends here.”
Yael’s activism made her a target for hate mail and even death threats. She once got a letter in the mail with six bullets inside.