Avi Nesher's 'Image of Victory' is a triumph of cinema - review

• Published date: 23 September 2021
• Author: HANNAH BROWN
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

It takes the audacious step of telling the story of the Battle of Nitzanim during the War of Independence from the points of view of both the Jewish residents and soldiers at Kibbutz Nitzanim and a journalist from Cairo and the Egyptian troops with whom he is embedded.

It is a risky choice but one that pays off, and it is moving in a way that few movies ever are. You don't walk out of it and forget it. You walk out of it wanting to think about it, talk about it and read about the true story on which it is based. It will join the ranks of such anti-war classics as Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory, also the story of a doomed battle.

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A preview screening of the film was held at the Haifa International Film Festival (which runs until September 28) on Wednesday night in a program called "Ground-Breaking Cinema." Not coincidentally, Nesher will also host a screening on September 25 of Paths of Glory, in the Haifa Classics section of the festival.

The Battle of Nitzanim is a little-known story of a kibbutz in the South that was pressured to hold the line against Egyptian forces and eventually, wildly outnumbered by Egyptian troops, surrendered after many of its residents were killed. It was seen by some – including then-army official and poet Abba Kovner, who is a character in the story – as an ignominious defeat, and for that reason is not as well known as many other stories from that war.

The story is anchored by two extraordinary characters, both of whom were real figures. Amir Khoury portrays the Egyptian journalist Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, who became a newsreel director when he covered the War of Independence, tasked by a producer who was pressured by generals to provide "images of victory" for King Farouk.

Heikal, a 24-year-old movie buff, saw this as an opportunity to create great cinema, but whenever he felt he had captured the truth of a war in which the Egyptian side suffered many casualties, he was told to somehow create military propaganda out of the story.

Khoury, who appeared in Fauda and is an acclaimed stage actor, gives a compelling performance and emerges as a full-fledged movie star: Whenever he is on screen, you cannot look at anyone else. He also plays Heikal in a framing device as a much older man who is angered when the Camp David Accords are signed and thinks back to 1948. "You see the enemy as a...