‘I wanted to express the very bizarre and extreme reality of these trips, what it’s really like to be there at that age,” said Asaf Saban, the writer/director of Delegation, a new feature film that opened on Thursday and looks at teens on a high-school class trip to Poland, where they visit death camps – a quintessentially Israeli rite of passage.
Saban knew that making a dramatic film about the reality of such trips, rather than the ideal, would not be easy. But he has created a thoughtful, compelling film, well-written and well acted, that illuminates the complexities of one of these trips in the ’90s.
It neither sentimentalizes the characters’ emotions nor condemns the teens for just being teens. He did that through creating several quirky, relatable characters, among them Frisch (Yoav Bavly,) a sensitive guy, who has a crush on Nitzan (Naomi Harari,) an ostensibly relaxed, confident girl.
But Nitzan is more troubled than she seems, and the trip brings out strange emotions in her, which cause her to take an action on one of the concentration camp tours that is very human but obviously wrong. Ido (Leib Levin) is a brash extrovert focused on usual teen concerns like girls and drinking, and doesn’t suddenly become an altruist in Poland.
Delegation spotlights how there is some manipulation built into these trips, as the teens have group discussions in which they are encouraged to show emotion, the more intense the better. The difficulties created by this are illustrated by the character of Yosef (Ezra Dagan, in a heartrending performance,) and Frisch’s grandfather. He is a survivor who accompanies the class.
As the grandfather begins telling his personal story to the group, he speaks charmingly and engagingly about his life and experiences as a child before his family was deported. But it’s rambling, contains a great deal of personal details, and isn’t what the group leader (Alma Dishy) wants to hear. She is portrayed not as a villain but as a cog in a system designed to elicit a particular set of reactions: tears at the horrors and pride in the State of Israel.
In one of the film’s most moving scenes, she takes the survivor aside and he admits that he knows he hasn’t been saying what the students need to hear. “I get it. You want me to get to the action more quickly,” he says. As the film goes on, he is overwhelmed by emotion and can’t “get to the action.”
Prize winning
It's not surprising that Saban’s complex, multi-layered script won the Anat Pirchi Best Screenplay Award at the Jerusalem Film Festival last year, or that his cast took the Best Ensemble Award there. And it’s particularly heartening that the film received recognition in Poland, where it won a special award at the Warsaw Film Festival.
The film was inspired by Saban’s own experiences on such a trip years ago. “It was the first time I was abroad without my parents. That’s an important detail,” he said. “There is something festive about being abroad. I remember the excitement and my wish, and I think this is characteristic of young people that age, regardless, whether they are Israeli or not, whether it is a Holocaust trip or not, to experience something great.
“The reality for me is that I remember the trip in fragments, and I remember feeling that I didn’t respond in the way I was meant to. I don’t remember much about the historical sites. I have many meaningless memories of small moments. I think this is what characterizes us as human beings, the gap between the expectations and what we really take away from the experience.”
He said he wasn’t interested in debating whether the trips are worthwhile or questioning the motivations of the students who take them. “Before you place a lot of political and sociological interpretation on them, the reality of these trips is that they are a very extreme and weird experience.
“As weird as they are, these trips are the ultimate normative experience for Israeli teens. It’s a dissonance that is fascinating for me, because it says a lot. I wanted to look at it and give more weight to the subtext. People go into this territory with a lot of expectations and preconceived opinions that are all expressed with an exclamation point.
“For me, it was very important to speak quietly, with sensitivity and to direct the viewer’s glance to the nuances and ask questions, and not necessarily give answers. I wanted to replace the exclamation points with question marks.”
He always kept in mind the importance of the reality of the Holocaust and to treat it with respect, not to exploit it for drama. “It’s something that I as a filmmaker am very sensitive to,” he said.
“It’s an ethical question. How do you create a drama in such places [where the Holocaust took place]? You can manipulate the viewers emotionally, by using imagery and using the Holocaust as a drama in the background to elicit emotions, in ways that are too easy. And the dilemma I felt as a filmmaker mirrors what the students go through there.”
Saban made a point of creating “very typical characters, who are dealing with small, ordinary problems. My challenge was to shift the attention to the details and dynamics among these characters in the present, when in the background you have the greatest drama, not just in Jewish history, but in the history of humanity.”
Speaking about the character of the grandfather who is not encouraged to express his story fully and in depth, he said, “I think he wants to succeed. He wants to perform his role in the way that is expected of him. He has the will to do it, but not the ability.”
Saban said that the toughest task for him was to put aside his perspective as an adult and recapture the feeling of what it was like to be in Poland and at the death camps at age 17.
But with Yosef, he allowed himself to look at the experience with the eyes of a more mature person. “There is a similarity between how I wanted to tell the story of the students in the film and how Yosef wants to tell his story.”
When a sheepish Yosef admits to the teacher that he knows he isn’t getting to “the action” – the horrors – quickly enough and will try to do better, that sentence expresses something that Saban was also grappling with. “I’m also saying to the viewers, you come to this with expectations, but maybe you won’t get the action in the places you expect, at the volume that you’re expecting to hear.
“With the character of Yosef, he is the storyteller, but he isn’t the storyteller you expect. The fact that he fails and can’t finish his task in the way that is expected of him – that is the deepest and truest proof of his authenticity, of the authenticity of his experiences and his feelings.
“I think that’s life. People like Anne Frank and Etty Hillesum succeeded in expressing their humanity in the context of their personal experiences, and that’s what creates the drama of their stories. That’s why you remember them.”