Lives of Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua illuminated in new films

• Published date: 30 September 2021
• Author: HANNAH BROWN
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

The Fourth Window, a documentary about Oz, was recently shown on Kan 11 and is currently available on the network's website, and the A. B. Yehosuha documentary, The Last Chapter of A. B. Yehoshua, which had its premiere at the Jerusalem Film Festival, will be broadcast on Kan on October 6 and will subsequently be on its site.

Qedar, who has made a number of acclaimed films, including several previous documentaries about poets and writers, among them Black Honey, the Life and Poetry of Avraham Sutskever, admitted in a recent interview that it was a bit daunting – and very labor-intensive – to do justice to these literary giants. "It's like you do a doctorate on each one," he said.

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"In the past I have done films about writers of an older generation, decades after their death and you know how their work is regarded. But when you are doing a documentary about a living artist, or a recently deceased one, you can't know how their work will hold up," said the director.

Qedar – who studied literature, not film – decided to focus on the intersections between their lives and work. "Oz and Yehoshua are Israelis whose work went around the world, they are the first generation of Israeli writers where that happened. I gradually got interested in writers' lives... I wanted to get at what was behind each writer, how each writer's life was connected to his work."

Qedar has succeeded in this quest in both of the films. The writers' lives are used to illuminate what drove them to become writers and he shows how their childhoods and backgrounds shaped them and enriched their work. You leave both of these entertaining and lively films with a feeling that you want to revisit their work. More than that, once you read or think about their books again after seeing these films, you will feel that you know them better and appreciate them more, which is exactly what Qedar set out to do.

THE OZ documentary, which is organized around intimate conversations that Oz had with his biographer and friend, Nurit Gertz, a couple of years before he died in 2018, shows how his life was bookended by two tragedies. The first was the turmoil in his family during his childhood, caused by the mental illness of his mother, whom he loved very much. After several tough years, she committed suicide, which he wrote about so memorably in A Tale of Love and Darkness but...