AVI MOGRABI (1956)
Z32
35 mm colour film
81’
2008
Z32
35 mm colour film
81’
2008
The film Z32 is a story of a young man, a former member of the elite unit of the Israeli Defence Forces, who recounts and reconstructs a murderous operation to his girlfriend and the viewers. The young man, as an anonymous confessor, reveals a contradiction between the adrenaline experiences at the battlefield, as a soldier would recount it, and the need for forgiveness, felt by a civilian. One of the questions the director asks is whether a film or cinema can become the hiding place for a war criminal. Mograbi’s remarkable film – a “documentary musical-tragedy”, as he himself describes it, takes us through a labyrinth which consists of a sense of duty to the homeland, an admission of guilt, a plea for forgiveness and the military reality, which is rarely a subject of discussion.
© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, the October Salon Collection and the artist
Gift Contract:
Inventory No. 207
Photograph: still from the film
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Avi Mograbi (1956, Tel Aviv, Israel) lives and works in Tel Aviv. He studied art and photography, and gained his first production experiences working as an assistant director on numerous commercials and feature films. His own filmmaking career began in 1989. Since 1999, he has taught documentary and experimental film at Tel Aviv University and the Bezazel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem.
He is equally committed to social, cultural and political justice in the Middle East and to the experimental and innovative approach to cinematic language. He is actively involved in Breaking the Silence, an organization dedicated to collecting the testimonies of Israeli soldiers who served in the occupied Palestinian territories. His films have been screened at numerous film festivals around the world, including Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Rome, New York, Marseille, San Francisco, Prague, Krakow, Sao Paulo, Rotterdam, Bilbao, Taiwan, Split…
More about the work at www.avimograbi.org