Sonic Cinema

Grade : A Year : 2022 Director : Alon Schwarz Running Time : 1hr 25min Genre : Documentary, Foreign

**Seen at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.

It’s arguably the most human impulse we have- wanting to erase the past. Of course, nobody is infallible, everyone’s made mistakes, but some people would rather we forget about the worst things we’ve ever done. In his thought-provoking documentary, Alon Schwarz (figuratively) digs down to the lie at the heart of the formation of the state of Israel, and asks us to look objectively at what happened, and reflect on what might come from acknowledging our past sins rather than running from them.

Tantura is a village on the sea in Israel. At the time the state was formed in 1948, Palestinian tribes lived there. During the “War of Independence” of 1948, the town was seized by Israeli forces, and the Palestinians were driven off. That is the official story, however. Whispers and oral histories tell a different story, and decades later, a student’s thesis on Tantura, which was built on interviews of both Jewish and Palestinian people who were alive at the time, first brought the question of whether what happened at Tantura was not so much a battle, but an ethnic cleansing. Listening to his recordings, still preserved, makes it sure seem like what happened in Tantura was, indeed, what the Palestinians know as the Nakba (the Catastrophe).

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a complicated one, to say the least. “Tantura” tangles the string further, and adds a layer of academic intrigue in it by way of Teddy Katz, the student who wrote the paper about the village. Even before that part of the narrative comes up in Schwarz’s documentary, I couldn’t help but think about our own inability to wrestle with our shameful history, be it the genocide of the American Indians or slavery, especially when it comes to the disturbing controversy over “Critical Race Theory,” and the attempts to sanitize how we teach the past in schools. What’s particularly mind-blowing about Katz’s situation is how easily his own school turns on him in response to governmental pressure, even though he has witnesses on tape discussing what happened, although that many of them seem to conveniently forget what happened during the afternoon the day they were in Tantura seems like selective memory at work.

The film begins with four individuals who still live in Tantura; they remained, and having their words at the beginning and end of the film is part of why it is so impactful. That Schwarz was still able to find so many people alive, and aware, of the time to interview for this film is one of the most remarkable parts about it, and why it is an essential historical documentary to experience. If you’re expecting this to end with reconciliation of the matter, I’ll go ahead and burst your bubble; what you do end with is further evidence- however circumstantial- that maybe, one day, someone should finish Schwarz’s work in this film in real life, uncover what has been (literally) buried for too long. It certainly appears that many people are aware of where to look.