Behind the Walls

by Gary M. Kramer

screening/interview

(CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Beginning in 1982, many Israeli soldiers completing their mandatory year of military service reported to Beaufort, a stone fortress set high on a mountain in southern Lebanon. Israel held the ancient castle, a key position in the Middle East conflict, for the next 18 years, until the Israeli army withdrew from Lebanon in 2000.

Adapted from Ron Leshem's novel, Joseph Cedar's Academy Award-nominated film Beaufort — which will be shown this Sunday at the Israeli Film Festival in Bryn Mawr — depicts the final weeks of the castle's occupation, as a group of young patrol soldiers struggle with confusion, claustrophobia and constant shelling by Hezbollah.

Aided by a uniformly strong cast, Israeli actor Ohad Knoller stars as Ziv, a bomb squad leader called in to dispose of a land mine. If Knoller looks familiar, it's because he manned a West Bank checkpoint in Eytan Fox's The Bubble, was a closeted gay soldier in Fox's Yossi & Jagger and, most recently, played an American Army psychiatrist in Brian de Palma's Redacted.

"I guess I fit into a uniform very well," says Knoller by telephone from Israel. "I know how to handle a uniform, and how to think and behave like a soldier."

It helps that, like almost all Israelis, he knows the army firsthand. He worked as a military engineer in bomb disposal in the army, and is still serving his reserve duty for another year. War, he says, is fundamental in Israeli life and culture, but the film is not all about the action, blood and guts we might associate with war stories. Rather, Beaufort moves at a slow, tense pace, making palpable the soldiers' strained efforts to bond and survive while they wait for the order to destroy the castle (which is done to prevent Hezbollah from using it after they leave). The historic moment fills the men with a sense of poignancy and dread; the camera follows them as they roam the empty corridors, fighting off boredom, anxiety and sorrow.

"American films make war an extreme sport," says Knoller, "but war is not nice, and it is not sexy. The experience is so stressed and compressed. It is something you carry with you forever."

(g_kramer@citypaper.net)

Beaufort, Sun., March 2, 7 p.m., $8-$10, Bryn Mawr Film Institute, 824 W. Lancaster Ave., Bryn Mawr, 484-904-5421, iffphila.com.