I was hoping that by the time the documentary Letter to David – about David Cunio, one of the hostages held by Hamas in Gaza – was shown on April 7 on Hot 8 at 10 p.m., he and his brother Ariel Cunio, also a hostage, would have been released, but it seems that isn’t in the cards.
That makes it more urgent to watch this extraordinary documentary, which was made by Tom Shoval and produced by Nancy Spielberg, among others, and premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in February. It is also showing at a number of Lev Cinemas throughout Israel paired with a talk by Shoval.
Letter to David comes at the story of David and his family from a different and highly cinematic angle, compared to a traditional documentary. Shoval knows David well, because David and his twin brother, Eitan, starred in the director’s acclaimed first feature, Youth, in 2013.
The strange part of this story is that David and Eitan played brothers who kidnap a wealthy classmate in order to pay their family’s debts with the ransom they think they will get for her. Shoval felt that he needed to use real siblings for the roles and searched Israel for brothers with an interesting, natural screen presence, which was how he found the Cunios.
To prepare for the release of Youth, Shoval gave the brothers a video camera and asked them to document their lives on Kibbutz Nir Oz in 2012 for a behind-the-scenes featurette. After October 7, Shoval discovered this footage, which was never released.
It shows scenes of Nir Oz when it was a close-knit, warm, thriving community. There are clips of David’s close friends there. These include Yarden Bibas, who was released in February after nearly 500 days in captivity, and Shiri Bibas, who was murdered with their sons, as well as many other residents who were kidnapped or killed.
No October 7 clips in the film
There are no clips from October 7 in Letter to David, only the videos taken by the brothers, footage from the film and from the set of Youth, and interviews with members of their family. It takes one face from the posters and creates a rich, human story.
MANY OF US deal with contradictions in our lives, but few people live with such diametrically opposed identities as Jacob Israel de Haan, whose short life was ended by an assassin’s bullet in Jerusalem in 1924. He is the subject of a fascinating new documentary, Jacob de Haan: A Voice Out of Time, by Zvi Landsman, which will be shown on KAN 11 on April 5 after Roni Kuban’s show, and will then be available on kan.org.il.
The documentary, which premiered at last year’s Docaviv festival, describes how de Haan was a revered figure to both the Neturei Karta anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox movement and the Dutch gay community, a unique combination.
Born to an observant family near Amsterdam in 1881, he broke with his strictly religious father, married a non-Jewish woman, and lived a secular life, studying law and writing for socialist magazines. Despite his marriage, he was actually gay and wrote the first homoerotic novel in Dutch.
Later, he had an awakening of sorts and became a Zionist. After he moved to Palestine, however, he joined up with ultra-Orthodox factions that opposed the establishment of a Jewish state, and became a spokesman for them, all the while continuing to have affairs with men and writing LGBT poetry.
He was convinced that the Jews of this era were discriminating against Arabs and felt that this was a mistake they would pay for. This stance raised the ire of the Hagana militia, which sent an assassin to kill him, a murder that the Neturei Karta sect still marks with sorrow.
Landsman gets three types of people to open up about de Haan and their feelings about him: a young Neturei Karta spokesman in Jerusalem, members of the gay community in the Netherlands, and academics and relatives of founders of the State of Israel, who go through archival material with the director to find out as much as possible about his murder.
De Haan’s life makes for an unforgettable story, and the movie spends quite a bit of time among the Neturei Karta in Jerusalem, a group that is rarely the subject of any serious investigation but lives just a few minutes from the city center.
“I’ve always felt like such a misfit, such a freak, such a weirdo,” says Madonna at the beginning of the new movie about her early career, Becoming Madonna, which is on Hot VOD and Next TV, and Yes VOD and Sting+. It’s very much the authorized Madonna origin story. She remembers coming to New York from Michigan at age 17 in 1978 with $35 as “the greatest thing I ever did.”
It has film clips of her early days as a dancer, and even photos of her in ballet class. It also traces how the beginning of the AIDS epidemic affected her, and how she chose to support charities for people with the disease and was supportive to her friends who contracted it and died, including her dance teacher. For fans of the singer, this will remind them of why they liked her music in the first place.
IF YOU’RE already trying to plan how to fill your children’s Passover vacations, Mufasa: The Lion King is now on Disney+ and Apple TV+, and will be on Hot VOD Cinema starting April 8. There has been a lot of criticism lately of Disney’s live-action remakes of their cartoon classics, following the flop of Snow White, but I feel the animal-oriented stories work better in the remakes, or in this case, in a prequel.
While it’s impossible to truly call these movies featuring realistic-looking but unrealistically cooperative animals “live-action,” it is arresting to see these creatures acting the story out on screen.
Mufasa, which is a story told by the Lion King character Rafiki (voiced by John Kani) to the cub Kiara (Blue Ivy Carter, who is Beyonce and Jay-Z’s daughter), the warthog Pumbaa (Seth Rogen), and the meerkat Timon (Billy Eichner), is about the adventures of the young Mufasa (Aaron Pierre), Simba’s father.
Like the original Lion King, it’s a story of rivalries, perils, friendship, and triumphs with lots of action, and it will be too intense for young children. This time, the music is by Lin-Manuel Miranda rather than Elton John, and you’re much less likely to hum tunes once it’s over. It’s no classic, but it will likely keep your children entertained for a couple of hours.
