Artistic responsibility
Ellis at The Sharp Side asks a simple question:
What secondly interests me about this movie is the question of artistic responsibility. What would we think of Alfred Hitchcock if he?d gone off to the Third Reich and made a thriller in which the bad guys were Jews, the Gestapo were represented as a neutral law and order organisation and Hitler?s Germany was presented as a pleasant everyday sort of place? Or if Michael Caine had starred in a thriller made in apartheid South Africa, where the bad guys were vicious, evil members of the African National Congress and the good guys were brave white cops?
Questions like this obviously don?t trouble some members of the acting profession or some professional musicians. The fact that they don?t is perhaps in part a tribute to the effectiveness with which the Israeli state has muffled awareness of its origins and history, its victims, and its fundamental sectarianism.
Among the British loveys in this film (which was apparently shot on location in Israel in 2000) are Olivia Williams, John Shrapnel, Derek Jacobi, Jason Flemyng and Ian McNeice. You may not know all the names but you?d certainly recognise the faces. They pop up in movies and TV dramas all the time.
The dedicated soundtrack music was supplied by the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by David Snell.
Ethnic cleansing? Torture? Sectarianism? Racism?
Nuffink to do with us, guv. We?re just simple entertainers.