Queers on Film, Part Two

With Zero Degrees of Separation, filmmaker Elle Flanders offers a vision of the Palestinian Occupation that manages to be both devastating and dreamy. Flanders, whose grandparents were instrumental in the creation of Israel and who spent part of her childhood there, grew interested in returning after coming across her grandparents’ home movie archive. In Zero Degrees, footage of Flanders’s return to Israel and her interactions with two mixed (Israeli/Palestinian) queer couples is interspersed with footage from these home movies. To see these sepia-toned images of the first hopeful steps toward Jewish statehood juxtaposed against contemporary images of the devastating fallout of that march is both enthralling and unsettling, like the deepest, darkest fairy tale, where all has gone awry.

In addition to mixing old footage of an infant Israel with contemporary footage of the Occupied Territories, Flanders also peppers her film with numerous captioned facts—from population statistics and geography and history lessons to figures about the various sorts of barriers used to corral the Palestinians and to separate them from their land and resources. I guess it goes without saying that these barriers also work to keep Palestinians alienated from one another, and, thus, isolated, powerless, and fragmented. While this may be the optimum moment to talk of suicide bombings and other atrocities, my focus here is not on the response of an oppressed people to the violence done them, no matter how appaling I may find that behavior. I focus, instead, on a thoughtful, well-made film and its intimate depiction of four people who daily navigate a world that I only know through media.

Flanders’s subjects are a gay male couple, Ezra and Selim, an Israeli and a Palestinian who live together in West Jerusalem despite Selim’s constant harassment and numerous arrests, and a lesbian couple, Edit, an Israeli, and Samira, a Palestinian, who live together in Tel Aviv where, despite similar political temperaments, they struggle to navigate the psychic distance that divides them. Through the eyes of these four people we see the grim realities of the Occupation, and as they each negotiate their relationships with their lovers, their selves, their ethnic compatriots, and their ethnic enemies, the complex workings of power, ethnicity, humanity, nationalism, and identity politics are illuminated.

As I was watching this film, I began to think about how the checkpoints and other barriers that are intended to disrupt the natural flow of life while creating tangible, geographical borders and margins begin to inscribe metaphorical borders around bodies themselves, so that it becomes impossible to imagine Israeli and Palestinian as anything other than mutually exclusive categories with impassable boundaries. Flanders deftly handles this notion of impenetrable borders by focusing on four individuals whose daily existence flies in the face of it: these four are, indeed, border-crossers, and while their sexuality is never in question, that they are queer is almost incidental. That they are human, however, is everything. I think that’s really refreshing.

Still, it is one thing for me to spend time thinking of nice sentences to describe the ways that these particular four people forge relationships with their lovers—that is, it is one thing to note, in an attempt to be clever, that their relationships with one another “cross boundaries,” with this kind of casual nod to the geographical and tangible boundaries that the Israelis build throughout the Occupied Territories. It is quite another thing to see the Israelis’ handiwork—the trenches and earth mounds, the concrete barriers and armed checkpoints, the fences, the walls, the razor wire … I carry this image with me, now, of ragged Palestinians moving through a disintegrating world, and, in particular, of an older Palestinian woman scaling concrete rubble, navigating hazardous ruins, stumbling forward into her ever-shrinking existence.

I understand that the situation in Israel and the Occupied Territories cannot be summed up in a clumsy review of a documentary, or, even, in the documentary itself. Still, I believe that there are certain truths that are self-evident, and this documentary presents them in a clear and unvarnished light. In her focus on four individuals negotiating various volatile landscapes—physical, emotional, political—Flanders shows us a dream of statehood buried deep under the wreckage of a dystopic reality.