Published: 17 October 2019
Last updated: 4 March 2024
IF YOU’RE A PALESTINIAN who’s committed a politically-motivated attack on Israelis, Lea Tsemel is the defence lawyer you’ll want. Her 48-year legal career -- during which she represented numerous Palestinians accused of terrorism – has earned her the admiration of human rights advocates in Israel, and the ire of most others.
The biographical documentary about Tsemel released earlier this year, Advocate, has turned out to be no less controversial than its protagonist. After premiering at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, the film won first prize at DocAviv, Israel’s most prestigious documentary film competition. It also won prizes in Thessaloniki, Krakow and Hong Kong.
But Israeli Culture Minister Miri Regev attacked the film for legitimising the firebrand lawyer. Following her comments, right-wing organisations picketed Mifal Hapayis, Israel’s national lottery company which also sponsors DocAviv, causing it to withdraw future sponsorship for the competition. That decision provoked pushback from cultural institutions, writers, and members of the Israeli film industry. Everything that touches Tsemel, so it would seem, immediately stirs an uproar.
But the film’s director, Rachel Leah Jones, who is visiting Sydney next week to speak at the film's screening at the Antenna documentary festival, believes the scandals surrounding the film are actually a sign of Israel’s democratic vital signs still in action.
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How did you come to choose Lea Tsemel as the protagonist of your documentary?
In a sense, I’d say Lea chose us and not the other way around. I’ve known her for almost 30 years. Actually, come to think of it, when I first met her — she was the same age that I am now (48). I had heard about her being a badass human right lawyer, but when I got to know her — I was blown away. Gutsy, sexy, funny, furious; nothing like Mother Teresa. If I’m honest, I kind of wanted to be her when I grew up.
Over the years, we got close, she and her partner Michel and their children became like family to me, and life went on. I became a documentary filmmaker and not a political lawyer (though one might argue that each of those domains entails being a human rights defender). When my partner, Philippe Bellaiche, came into the picture almost 20 years ago, the first thing he said after meeting Lea was: “Someone has to make a film about her.”
In essence, this film, which portrays a very powerful female figure, is the brainchild of my male co-director because after two decades during which no one came along to make that film, Philippe finally looked at me one day and said: “Well, it looks like that ‘someone’ is us.”
How did it feel to follow Lea around on her work? Was she easy or hard to work with?
Lea is a pussycat! We know that might sound funny, when you see her doing her thing all fast and furious throughout the film. But when people don’t pose a threat or mount an unreasonable obstacle, there’s no need to bulldoze them.
According to Philippe, who is a cinematographer by profession, of the dozens of documentaries he’s filmed, rarely has he encountered a subject who submitted so easily to the logic of cinema verité, to the initial artifice which, when it works, turns into an organic, seamless tango.
Lea’s lack of self-consciousness has nothing to do with being unaware of the camera — she is both media literate and media savvy. But her ego is… different. If the phrase: “Lights, camera, action!” were used in documentary, they’d be superfluous in Lea’s case; she’s always in action.
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Smart as she is, she’s more of a doer than a thinker. She plays herself naturally rather than performs herself superficially. Lea, as the film clearly demonstrates, is a person who devotes herself fully. In our case, she devoted herself to the making of the movie; that is to us as its makers. And tiny as she is, she needs no pedestal. Not once did she say “no” (she’s too clever for that, after all she’s a lawyer, a professional persuader...).
She gave us her trust and we reciprocated with our integrity. Lea likes a project, any project. If you think her workweek ends after 50-60 hours of running from office to court to jail to prison to the Ministry of Justice and back — think again. She has family, friends, a feminist support group and always keeps a random, person-in-need on hand. As her daughter says in an interview outtake: “My mother thinks she’s the handyman of the universe.”
Your film won the DocAviv best documentary award. What do you think makes it so timely and important in Israel?
Our reception at DocAviv was beyond our wildest expectations. Initially the film was scheduled for three screenings. Before the festival opened, they all sold out. They added a fourth screening — it sold out. After the film won, they added a fifth screening and it too sold out. Over the course of a week, some 2000 Israeli Jews saw the film. Not a single person hassled or heckled.
Lea got standing ovations at all the screenings she attended and we were told that in the screenings we did not attend, people sat in their seats and clapped throughout the end credits. All this defied our imagination and indicated that people were ready for another narrative.
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After four years of the most right-wing and overtly racist government Israel had known to date -- a period during which people fell silent at worst and minced their words at best -- people were ready to push back and carve out some more political space for themselves. It was as if they had said: “If this is the ‘new normal,’ we’re pushing back.” And who better to trigger that movement than Lea, “the angry optimistic woman,” as she refers to herself in the film.
What are your thoughts on the "Mifal Hapais" scandal following the award? What does it mean?
As I noted earlier, throughout DocAviv, there was no backlash. But soon enough, a small group of bereaved parents were incited by a right-wing vigilante group to protest the award. They took their grievance to the Minister of Culture who then passed the ball to the Arts and Culture Council of the Israel Lottery — the funding body behind the special Oscar-campaign grant (DocAviv is an Oscar-qualifying festival) issued to the winning film in addition to the first prize. Within no time the Lottery caved by rescinding its support for future winning films and putting our grant under legal review.
This prompted another surprise: the entire arts community stood on its hind legs and protested the lottery’s move. Writers, actors, fine artists, theatre folks — there was near wall-to-wall consensus that enough was enough.
After people withdrew their candidacies for top literary awards, resigned from selection committees and returned grants unspent, the Israel lottery retracted its revocation and transferred the said funds to DocAviv to the benefit of our film this year, and future films in coming years.
The official announcement was made the day after the latest round of Israeli elections and one could feel that while the proverbial truck that is Israel is still barreling down a slippery slope into a collision course with history, the people have nevertheless forced it to downshift from turbo into 3rd gear. That is, there are more and more signs that the battle for progressive values has been lost — and yet the war ain’t over yet.
What are your thoughts following the arrest of Tareq Barghout, A Palestinian lawyer who also features prominently in the film, on charges of terrorism?
On February 27, 2019, a month to the day after Advocate had its world premiere at Sundance, attorney Tareq Bargouth was arrested. Tareq was Lea’s co-council in the two real-time cases in the film — that of a 13-year old boy accused of two attempted murders and that of a 31-year old woman accused of trying to commit a suicide bombing. In more cinematic terms: Tareq appears as Lea’s sidekick. Don Quixote’s Sancho Panza.
As the film progresses, Tareq, who expresses little confidence in the Israeli legal system to begin with, loses faith altogether after the woman and the boy are found guilty and given unprecedentedly harsh sentences: 11 and 12 years in prison, respectively. In one of the last scenes of the film, Tareq takes off down the courthouse stairs saying: “I can’t!” leaving Lea to face the press, and their public defeat, alone.
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Yet nobody foresaw what “altogether” actually meant. What we now know is that 10 days after the sentence, Tareq committed his first shooting. Despondent and desperate, he took a rifle and headed to a military checkpoint where Israeli authorities usually release the bodies of Palestinian perpetrators eliminated on sight at the scene of a crime.
[Elhanan Miller writes: He fired 13 shots at two police jeeps; three bullets hit the back of one of the vehicles. Barghout fled from the scene, according to a report in Haaretz, Subsequently, he carried out three more attacks on his own, having later recruited a well-known Palestinian militant who would go out with him on occasion to shoot at armoured settler buses transporting both soldiers and civilians.]
Their working assumption, as per their confessions, was that they would not cause casualties but rather “disrupt the occupation.” (Editor: Lea Tsemel represented him, according to the Haaretz story.) While his partner-in-crime is expected to stand trial, Tareq negotiated a plea bargain wherein he would be sentenced to 13 years in prison. Fed up with playing his part in helping to put his own people away, he felt as if he’d “won” by getting a term longer than his clients.
Nobody saw it coming: neither his wife nor his children, certainly not his colleagues — Lea included — nor did we, his documenters. It hit us like a bolt of lightning on a sunny day. At first, we had no idea why he’d been arrested. When information started to leak, we had to keep it to ourselves because there was a gag order on the case.
As soon as we could, we added a slide at the end of the film explaining what had happened. We used the dry, factual language of convention yet felt anything but dry and factual. We felt very sad. Needless to say, this was not the ending we’d hoped for.
They say about documentary that it's stranger than fiction, as it turns out reality is even stranger than documentary; and harsher.
SCREENINGS OF Advocate
ANTENNA
Advocate screens at the Antenna documentary festival at 3pm on October 19 at the Chauvel Cinema and 8pm on October 22 at the Verona Cinema. The Jewish Independent will present a Q & A with Rachel Leah Jones after both sessions Click here for bookings
JIFF
Advocate will also screen at the Jewish International Film Festival (JIFF) on November 5 (Sydney) and November 13 and 18 (Melbourne). The Jewish Independent will present a Q & A after the November 18 screening with prominent barrister Robert Richter QC. Click here for detail and bookings
