Fugitive Pieces, S.O.P. & Toronto Jewish Film Festival

by Marc Glassman .

Fugitive Pieces. Robert Lantos, producer; Jeremy Podeswa, director &
script based on the novel by Anne Michaels. Starring: Stephen Dillane
(Jakob), Rade Sherbedgia (Athos), Rosamund Pike (Alex), Ayelet Zurer
(Michaela), Robbie Kay (young Jakob), Ed Stoppard (Ben), Nina Dobrev
(Bella)

S.O.P. (Standard Operating Procedure) feature documentary by Errol
Morris

Toronto Jewish Film Festival. May 311. TJFF.COM/ 4169671528
Screenings at The Bloor, Al Green Theatre @ Miles Nadal JCC, Sheppard
Grande. 9 Days—86 films

Fugitive Pieces
Spoiler Alert: Happy Ending!

Viewers eager to see Fugitive Pieces, the prestigious opening night
gala at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival, will be in for a
surprise when the film receives its long anticipated commercial release
today. The poignant tale of Holocaust survivor Jakob Beer’s life and
loves has been reedited, changing his ending from a tragic to a happy
one. Writer and director Jeremy Podeswa and producer Robert Lantos have
reconfigured the picture, leaving Jakob alive, anticipating the birth
of a child with his long awaited love Michaela, instead of perishing in
a traffic accident.

When asked to explain the new ending, Podeswa replied: “We have
received a lot of feedback since premiering the film and while it has
been overwhelmingly positive, we also found that many who loved the
film also found the experience of watching it incredibly despairing.
Clearly that was never our intention... we always believed that the
film should be inspirational and hopeful, even as it deals with very
difficult and complex subject matter.”

Podeswa closely supervised the new cut with editor Wiebke von
Carolsfeld. He adds, “There were no reshoots and we felt that we would
only make changes if they could be done in a simple, organic way that
was true to the tone and essence of the film.”

Podeswa admits that the new cuts do have an impact on the film. “What
the film ultimately leaves the audience with is in fact somewhat
altered, which was the intention of the changes.” Anne Michaels, the
author of the awardwinning novel upon which the film is based, has
seen the new version, as have many of the actors and key crewmembers.
She comments: “Since the screening at the Toronto International Film
Festival, changes have been made to the ending of the film and these
changes for me are controversial. But the film is full of compassion
and complexity and the performances by Robbie Kaye, Rade Sherbedgia and
Stephen Dillane are incredibly powerful. Jeremy's integrity can be felt
at every turn."

Recalling her reasons for making Jakob’s fate a tragic one, Michaels
points out that his destiny is known from the beginning of the book.
“It was very important that it’s somewhere in the back of your mind
while reading the book…The novel is haunted. I wanted the reader to
feel the absence of Jakob…The legacy of his life is [fulfilled] not
through of a child of his own but through [his life and
poetry]…something beyond the personal.” Michaels clearly realizes that
a movie is different from a book: "Podeswa’s film [still] contains
achingly moving scenes, images that speak a truth and seem saturated
with sorrow.”

The relationship between a Greek Christian Athos Roussos, who saves the
young Jewish boy Jakob Beer during World War 2, is at the heart of both
the film and book for producer Robert Lantos. “This film is, at its
core, about a selfless act of human kindness. A man risks his life to
save that of a stranger, with no possible recompense. And that love in
turn is passed on to others and heals each of its recipients. We
believe that in the final version of Fugitive Pieces this, the central
theme of our movie, is crystallized with the power of truth.”

While Lantos’ assessment is persuasive, the new ending will disappoint
those who loved Fugitive Pieces as a novel. Imagine Anna Karenina with
a happy ending. You can’t? Neither can I.

(Adapted from my article in Playback, with thanks).

Standard Operating Procedure (S.O.P.) is a political film that denies
any obvious agenda, a toughminded investigation into crime that honors
both victims and victimizers, and a philosophical inquiry into the
meaning of photography. It is a passionate cry from the heart of an
American artist who feels, after the revelations of Abu Ghraib and the
Iraq war, ashamed of his country. And, while it is without question one
of the most stylishly constructed documentaries ever made, S.O.P. is a
film that, just as significantly, never accepts easy answers about one
of the most shocking events in recent history.

Errol Morris’ new documentary, his first since the Oscar winning Fog of
War, immediately takes its place in the forefront of the growing number
of features about the war in Iraq. Like the vast majority of those
films, there is a sense of moral outrage and sadness in S.O.P., but it
is infused with a clear minded urgency, a need to know why events
happened, that mirrors few works apart from Charles Ferguson’s far less
aesthetic No End in Sight. By focusing on Abu Ghraib, and on the
photographs taken by American soldiers of Iraqi prisoners who had been
sexually humiliated, tortured and, in one case, murdered under their
watch, Morris has returned to his finest persona, the private eye.

Once, as a combination of sleuth and filmmaker, Morris was instrumental
in proving that a convicted killer, Randall Adams, was innocent of
murdering a Texas policeman. By freeing an innocent man, Morris was
able to provide justice while creating a film, The Thin Blue Line,
which made him a national presence, far more prominent than most
documentarians.

With the same dogged determination that made his investigation of the
Adams case so remarkable, Morris has pursued the story of Abu Ghraib.
He has amassed over a “millionandahalf words of transcript, over
thirty interviews, tens of thousands of pages of documents and over a
thousand photographs.”

S.O.P. bears the fruit of Morris’ Herculean labors. The horrifying
events of the fall of 2003, when American troops routinely stripped
Iraqi prisoners naked while tormenting them, are dramatically
reconstructed by impressionistic camerawork backed up by the real,
still scandalous, photographs and characteristically incisive
interviews. Chipping away against initial resistance, the director was
able to get convicted Abu Ghraib participants Javal Davis, Jeremy
Sivits, Roman Krol, Sabrina Harman and Lynndie England to talk at
length on camera. Other interviewees include Brigadier General Janis
Karpinski, exmilitary Specialist Megan Ambuhl Graner and Criminal
investigations Special Agent Brent Pack.

Using his acclaimed invention the interrotron, which allows his
interviewees to virtually establish eye contact with audiences, Morris
gives us an extraordinary cast of characters including the
straightlaced General Karpinski, her voice barely controlling rage, as
she explains how she was misled into allowing Abu Ghraib to happen
under her command.

The most interesting of Morris’ interviewees are the notorious Private
Lynndie England and Specialist Sabrina Harman. England, the 95pound
poster child for the Abu Ghraib atrocities appears in the now infamous
photo, smiling and smoking a cigarette, while a pyramid of naked Iraqis
are posed in front of her. She has been so demonized by the media that
even Morris wondered whether the now dishonored exPrivate was capable
of giving a cogent interview. But under the complicit eye of the
Interrotron, England comes to life.

“She’s perfectly articulate,” comments Morris. “What I got from her was
this unending sadness. Imagine what it would be like to be blamed for
the entire failure of the Iraq war. She’s been put in something like
that position.”

For Morris, the truly remarkable photograph and “smoking gun” in Abu
Ghraib is of Sabrina Harman posing with the dead Iraqi Manadel
alJamadi. His fascination with the photograph of Harman smiling with
her thumb up over alJamadi’s body galvanizes the film. “That
photograph really really interests me,” says Morris. “I remember what I
thought when I first saw that photograph. I thought ‘Why is she
smiling? Why does she have her thumb up?’”

Morris did ask Harman for an explanation but none was forthcoming. But
it’s at this juncture that Morris, the investigator, takes the kind of
imaginative leap that all great private eyes do in hardboiled
detective novels. “What’s interesting to me,” he comments, “is that
we’re asking the wrong question. We’re asking, “Why is she smiling?”
when the question should be “What happened to that guy who is dead?”
The assumption, of course, is that she is in some way responsible for
his death. And, of course, she’s not.”

Morris’ voice takes on additional power and passion as he continues.
“Not only is she not the killer, she has nothing whatsoever to do with
the murder. It turns out that alJamadi was brought in by special ops,
by Navy Seals. He walked into Abu Ghraib under his own power, was
brought to the shower room on tier 1B, the notorious heart side. He
walked into the shower room and he left the shower room a corpse.”

It was only Harmon among the military at Abu Ghraib who recognized the
enormity of alJamadi’s death. “First she poses for the photograph…with
the thumb and the smile. And they [other military] leave and she comes
back. She starts taking forensic photographs. Over a dozen of them.
Details of the injuries. ‘It’s absolutely clear,’ she says, ‘looking at
the injuries, this guy did not die of a heart attack. He was beaten to
death.’ She doesn’t tell anybody except her closest friends about the
photographs. She’s the one that has the evidence of the murder.

“What’s so remarkable is that she’s threatened with prosecution for
having taken those photographs. It becomes a perverse and disturbing
story about how a photograph leads us in the wrong direction
altogether. That we’ve seen what we need to know. And yet we have
entirely missed the content of what we’re looking at.”

It is the veracity of the images at Abu Ghraib that have swept Morris
through his investigative process. Posed or not, they convey the
terrifying message, that the US forces in Iraq have little or no
compassion for the people who live in lands they now occupy and that,
through imperial fiat, the Bush administration has condoned gross
violations of human rights. The alJamadi photos, which prove a murder
took place under the direction of the military or, more likely, the
CIA, is just the kind of evidence that a Philip Marlowe would need to
prove his case.

Susan Sontag endorsed the notion of the photographer as the
truthteller. So, clearly, is a documentarian like Morris, whose credo
for his nation may well be to not take anything at face value. “I
think photographs are remarkable,” comments Morris. “It’s just that we
have to be aware that we can be tricked by them. I think skepticism in
general is a wonderful thing. Skepticism about what we read, skepticism
about what we hear, skepticism about what we see.”

For Morris, who feels that his country “has gone horribly offcourse,”
the lucid investigative tone of S.O.P. is a bracing tonic for a society
that has “been manipulated. We can be fooled,” he says, ruefully. “ I
think awareness of that is a good thing. It’s essential.”

Toronto Jewish Film Festival (TJFF)

How do you sum up 86 films screening over 9 days? “Whether you like
haggis or herring,” as this year’s Toronto Jewish Film Festival’s
slogan goes, there’s bound to be something here for any viewer to
enjoy.

Since 2008 is the 60th anniversary of the birth of Israel, the TJFF is
highlighting that country’s national cinema. Many features, including
the Oscar nominated Beaufort, testify to the growing strength of
Israel’s feature film industry. TV series from Israel are also being
screened, including the comedy hit Arab Labor.

Documentaries remain an important element in TJFF programming with a
choice of subjects that stretch widely from the Holocaust to historical
accounts of espionage to contemporary reports on the striving for peace
in the Middle East. Starting this year, the best doc premiering in
Canada at the TJFF will win the “Tzimmie,” a prize named after the
production company headed by filmmaker David A. Stein before his
untimely death at the age of 34 in 2004.

With so many films on difficult topics—and in a week when Jewish
filmmakers Jeremy Podeswa and Errol Morris are releasing somber
features—it is a pleasure to focus on programmer Ellie Skrow’s series
at TJFF, “Comedy On Wry.”

This programme offers a rare opportunity to look closely, through docs,
at the work of such geniuses of standup comedy as Lenny Bruce, Mort
Sahl, Don Rickles, Jackie Mason, Danny Kaye and the brilliant duo of
Mike Nichols and Elaine May. Edgy, outrageous and often obstreperous,
these comics made you laugh at codes of polite behaviour that are still
dominant in our society.

Also included in this series are docs on the extraordinary Will Eisner
(A Sequential Artist), who nearly singlehandedly made comic books a
mature art form and Caesar’s Writers, the madcap group of prose
stylists—including Neil Simon, Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks—who made Sid
Caesar’s early TV series into legendary events.

“Comedy on Wry” may be just one programme among many offered at the
16th annual Toronto Jewish Film Festival but it celebrates something
essential: the ability of one group of people to enjoy “laughter among
the tears” that can often overwhelm us in life.

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