Chloé Cooper Jones wrote for VICE in April:
My interview with Israeli filmmaker Ada Ushpiz was pushed back an hour so that she could finish watching Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas speak on television. “I‘m sorry,” said Ushpiz, calling from her home in Tel Aviv. “I had to watch. Abbas spoke to the Israelis and said things we’re told all the time he doesn’t say, which is, ‘I want to make peace.’ The discourse is always presented as if Abbas doesn’t want to talk and he’s not interested in a partnership with the Israelis and there is no possibility for peace. But Abbas said, ‘Let‘s sit and talk.’ It was great, you know? I don’t see Netanyahu coming back and saying, ‘OK, let‘s talk.'” Ushpiz let out a weary breath. “No, that will not happen.”
Ada Ushpiz‘s new documentary, Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt, is as much about present-day Islamophobia in Israel and abroad as it is about Arendt. The documentary—showing at New York’s Film Forum through April 19—reminds viewers of Arendt’s urgent relevancy for us today; and it does so without making any explicit political statements. Instead, the film allows Arendt’s decades-old arguments, presented through carefully curated quotes, to linger on the screen, asking the viewer to read, reflect, and perhaps reread before moving on. The restraint is intentional. “I didn’t want to preach,” explained Ushpiz. “But I didn’t stop thinking about our world while I was making the film. I was always thinking about my responsibility in this world.”
Filed under: Documentaries, History, The Holocaust, World War II
