When Israel’s Negev Desert is used as a stand-in for the bone-dry landscape of Afghanistan, a blue filter is used to disguise the characteristic red hue of the local sun — a trick of movie-making illusion that inspired the title of Israeli documentarian Daniel Mann’s Under a Blue Sun, screening in the Tiger Competition of the Rotterdam International Film Festival.
The American producers of Rambo III, the 1988 action blockbuster in which Sylvester Stallone reprised his role as a Vietnam vet against the backdrop of the Soviet-Afghan war, turned the desert into a film set for their war movie. It had already been cordoned off into fire zones, with civilians prohibited from entering, and Hollywood bigwigs paid the Israeli military to help them facilitate the shoot out of the production’s mammoth budget. At the time of its release, it was the most expensive film ever made, and even incorporated real drills of F-16 squadrons that had been caught on camera flying overhead. Mann, who is now based in London, puts the collaboration between Hollywood and the Israel Defense Forces under critical scrutiny in an intricately constructed, incisive and thought-provoking reflection on war simulation, contested territories, and the might and monopoly on meaning-making of the entertainment industry. Under a Blue Sun could not be more politically timely, and should garner much interest from festivals programming documentaries at the more formally experimental end of the spectrum.
The multi-layered doc considers the Negev as a warzone of weaponised ideology, projected illusion, and the obfuscation of inhabitancy. The Negev was not empty before it was turned into fire zones, Mann is at pains to point out: Bedouin Arabs were driven from these Jahalin tribal lands by armed forces and by settlers after the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, and have been unable to return. Bashir Abu-Rabia, a self-taught artist who worked in special effects on the Rambo set, and whose family was displaced from what had been their home for generations, recounts his own history and how he recreated the look of a terrain of conflict for the movie.
Under a Blue Sun is dense with ideas and cerebral, but packaged with enough of the audience-hook of Hollywood spectacle to keep it from being an overly heavy or dryly theoretical viewing experience. Mann, whose past documentary work includes the feature-length Low Tide (2017), about a man who has defected from military service and is adrift on the streets of Tel Aviv, clearly knows his subject. Going hand-in-hand with his cinema is his academic work on the use of image warfare in armed conflict, the latter being unlikely to have won him any fans among the hawkish.
In archival footage from 1988, Stallone, with the big hair and biceps of the tough-guy era, talks about the advantages of shooting in Israel. He describes it as a place that could be dicey due to terrorist incidents, but one filled with a nervous tension easily transmitted to the camera. Here, we get a sense of the way in which the horror and pain of actual conflict has existed in uneasy, propagandistic symbiosis with the Hollywood entertainment machine.
In a film of split realities that play out in parallel in the same geographical space, screen time is also given to Sabrin Abu Kaf of the Negev Coexistence Forum. He has been working to document human rights violations in villages that the state does not recognise or connect to existing infrastructure. This refusal of legality by the regime has left the Bedouin inhabitants struggling for basic subsistence, and having to hide their homes from detection and destruction. Militaristic bravado and the explosive gusto of multi-million-dollar thrills, in which the line between war and simulation is razor-thin, is engineered on land where those disenfranchised hide as best they can in plain sight. These contrasting threads of spectacle and erasure boggle the mind as much as they trouble the heart.
Director, screenwriter: Daniel Mann
Cast: Bashir Abu Rabiah, Lobla Alsana, Dani Ben Menachem
Cinematography: Itay Marom
Editing: Simon Birman
Sound design: Yohann Bernard, Lenny Moreau
Music: Beny Wagner
Producers: Itai Tamir, Christophe Gougeon, Fabrizio Polpettini
Production companies: Acqua Alta, La Bête, Laila Films
Sales: Acqua Alta, La Bête, Laila Films
Festival: Rotterdam (Tiger Competition)
In Hebrew, Arabic, English
80 minutes
