Avi Mograbi met his grandfather in a dream. The setting: Damascus, 1920. Would the two have spoken Arabic or Hebrew at this impossible encounter? It’s amazing that they were able to communicate at all! For Mograbi barely speaks Arabic, and his grandfather only learned Ivrit later. Another impossible conversation begins in his friend Ali Al-Azhari’s flat: between Avi, the Jew, and Ali, the Palestinian. Their lively, affectionate exchange about ancestors, vocabularies and dreams is supposed to prepare for a film that ends up not being made. But since the footage has already been shot, why not use it to tackle a new Israeli-Palestine reality?

The archived testimonies of “Breaking the Silence”, an association of military veterans, are to be turned into a compilation of “service incidents” in the Israeli-occupied territories. But Avi Mograbi confesses: “My films tend to get complicated, even when my intention is to make a very simple film.” His reaction to a complex doom is artistically and intellectually commensurate: complex. Once again he uses a built-in commentary function in which he himself, white-bearded, explains the tricky situation to his audience: not as a special “Israel-Palestine” case, but as the bitter standard application of the globally familiar aporetic model of “military occupation”.

Under file entry Z32, the testimony of a former elite soldier of the Israeli army is preserved. He confesses to having participated in the killing of Palestinians. Was it a breach of duty resulting from high spirits, collateral damage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the self-fulfilling prophecy of every military training? Avi Mograbi uses the testimony and his own disturbance as an occasion to re-interrogate the confessor who is made anonymous by image manipulation. He calls his cross examination a “documentary musical tragedy”, because he sings his comments right into the experimental interrogation room: “Oy, I’m harbouring a murderer, oy, inside my film.”