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FEATURE FILM

2024

84' – DCP – Color – Israel, France, Switzerland, Brazil, UK

Shikun

Inspired by Eugène Ionesco’s play, the film recounts the emergence of intolerance and totalitarian thinking through a series of day-to-day episodes that take place in Israel in a single building, the Shikun. In this hybrid group of people of different origins and languages, some turn into rhinoceroses, but others resist. An ironic metaphor for life in our contemporary societies.


INTERVIEW WITH AMOS GITAI

What does the title Shikun mean?

There was a debate about the title between two options, the second being It’s Not Over Yet, based on the song you hear in the film. My friends in Tel Aviv prefer the second title, which will also be the title of the film in Israel, but I prefer Shikun, which in Hebrew means “social housing”, a building for people to live in. The word comes from a verb meaning “to shelter”, “to give refuge”. And the film gives shelter to people who, for different reasons, need refuge from the threat of rhinos. I like the sound of the word, I know that most people won’t know what it means, but that doesn’t bother me, on the contrary. There’s something abstract about it that suits me, that's in the spirit of the project.


How would you describe the process that led to the making of this film?

The film was born in relation to what was then the context in Israel, before October 7. We were in the middle of a huge protest movement against the attempt by Netanyahu and his far-right government to reform the legal system, with large demonstrations bringing together feminist groups, soldiers, academics, economists, people campaigning for peaceful coexistence between Palestinians and Israelis and a large section of civil society against the destruction of the democratic legal system. This movement was also a reaction to the rise of a form of conformism, the disappearance of the critical spirit, in Israeli society. It was in this context that I re-read Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros, written at the end of the 1950s as an anti-totalitarian fable, and which seemed to me to echo what we were experiencing. I saw in it the possibility of inspiration for a film about the present we were living in. At the time, I was rehearsing in Tel Aviv the stage version of House, the play inspired by my 1980 film. The whole cast was there, including Irène Jacob and the Palestinian actress Bahira Ablassi. At the same time as we were working on the play, we got collectively involved in this project, which I wrote quite quickly. I called the cinematographer Eric Gautier, with whom I’ve worked on four of my previous films over the last twelve years, and he arrived straight away. We were able to put together the material conditions and shoot without delay, thanks also to the complicity of the producers, technicians and artists with whom I have this long relationship of collaboration and friendship.


Was the film as we see it written beforehand, or was it more the result of improvisation and invention during the shoot?

It was largely written. The first part was entirely scripted, for this particular building, whose architecture helps me to structure the story, to organise the way we see the cohabitation and interference of the very different people who live there. It creates a spatial unit where Israelis, Palestinians, Ukrainians and so on move around. All these people belong to everyday reality, and among them is a special person, played by Irène Jacob, who is frightened by the emergence of these creatures, the rhinoceroses. She is the character most directly inspired by Ionesco’s play, even playing several of the play’s opposing protagonists.


We know how important architecture is to your work, from your studies at the University of California at Berkeley to films directly linked to a building, such as the trilogy House-A House in Jerusalem-News from Home, or your series of portraits of leading figures in Israeli architecture. What is the building in which the film is set?

It’s a well-known building, said to be the longest in the Middle East, at over 250 metres long. And it is indeed a shikun, a social housing building. It stands in the town of Beer-Sheva in the centre of the Negev desert in southern Israel. The building itself is a powerful architectural gesture, in the spirit of Le Corbusier, a kind of coup de force, a statement in the middle of the desert. Its spatial organisation, perspectives, angles and building materials help me to bring these different characters and activities to life in contiguous ways, which can be conflicting or simply ignore each other, without having to create artificial sequences, series of causes and effects, as too many films force themselves to do. The film is about the chaos of the world, the chaos created by war, economic inequality and injustice. Most films tend to sugarcoat this chaos by assembling logical, psychological, sociological and other explanations for behaviour, which reassures the audience. But in my view this is a delusion, a dishonesty. Reality is the result of heterogeneous forces, chance and illogical interference. And in the midst of all this, there is an active force: fear. Fear is not a given, it is constructed, it is manufactured, and leaders like Trump, Netanyahu, Orban, Putin, etc. are engineers of fear, and obviously so is Hamas. They thrive on the feeling of fear that they produce and maintain. This is what rhinoceroses represent metaphorically, and this is what we must resist.


Shikun belongs to a group of films you’ve made that are characterised by what you might call a semi-enclosed camera: recently, Laila in Haifa, A Tramway in Jerusalem, Ana Arabia, or even going back to Alila. They are all set entirely within a delimited space, but with glimpses of the outside world in one way or another.

Yes, each time it’s the project of exploring a microcosm with the ambition that it will reflect a more general truth. In much the same way as the study of a cell would provide a representation of, and information about, an entire living body. This unity of place, and indeed also of time, implies some fairly radical formal choices, which organise the flow of movement and make the forces that concentrate and oppose each other visible. One of these directorial choices is clearly the use of the sequence shot – which I took to extremes for Ana Arabia, filmed in a single shot. But the precise answers are different each time; the sequence shots in Shikun are not the same as in my other films, and neither is the editing.


You mentioned the chaos of the world that the film aims to portray, but at the same time there is a highly choreographed aspect to all the movements – with great use made of this new filmmaking tool, the trotinette.

We worked a lot on the fluidity of the shots, using the trotinette as a useful means of movement. The concerted organisation of the movements tends to create a certain formal unity, an inner dynamic, thanks to the sequence shots and the moving camera, while at the same time capturing the chaos.


How do you achieve this?

I draw a lot, and I also make numerous visits to the shooting location, with each actor and each technician, so that we can agree on the contributions and movements of each person, on the rhythms, on the framing, on the depths. My training as an architect helps me considerably. And during the shoot, I direct everyone using a large loudspeaker, so coordination is essential.


How did you work with the actors?

First, we worked on the text. I gave Irène Jacob a copy of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, which she used as a basis for her acting suggestions, and we progressed by exchanging a lot of ideas. She was very committed, and contributed a lot, including the scene where she partly strips naked, which was her idea. The film’s aim is not to provide ready-made answers, but to open up questions, provoke confusion and encourage viewers to make their own way. And neither the actors nor I know all the reasons for what's going on; it's a search for each and every one of us, a kind of quest. At best, we understand what we've done after we’ve done it. When you have sequence shots with a large number of moving protagonists and complex camera movements, you can’t improvise; you have to adjust everything to the millimeter. The film is born of this requirement, as well as of the openness of our questioning.


What about the other actors and actresses?

In each case, I started from something in common, which concerned him or her, or which served as a point of departure. For example, I know Hannah Laszlo well, who played one of the main roles in Free Zone. The book she finds in the film while rummaging through the Yiddish library is a copy that her father, a survivor of the Theresienstadt deportation camp, gave her for her bat mitzvah. The place where her character finds herself, the old, somewhat abandoned Yiddish library, actually exists. Yaël Abecassis, who has acted in six of my films since Kadosh, suggested a biblical text from the Psalms, which she transposed in relation to rhinoceroses. Bahira Ablassi, an extraordinary Palestinian actress already present in Laila in Haifa, is also very gifted in the visual field, and created the horns seen in the film, working with the decoration technicians. Etc.


The dialogues are in several languages, including Hebrew and Arabic. For those who don’t speak these languages, it can be difficult to know which one is being used.

This is deliberate, and I didn’t want the subtitles to help differentiate between them, for example by using two colors as is often done. This obviously creates a difference between those who know these languages and those who don't, which is also interesting. The fact that there’s uncertainty for people who don’t come from this region, who don’t know the languages, is part of the film’s proposition. Above all, I don’t want to be didactic.


In addition to the central reference to Ionesco, the film also draws on other literary references.

Yes, it ends with a poem by Mahmood Darwish, Think of others, there’s also a passage from Umberto Eco, on cowardice, and also a text by Israeli journalist and writer Amira Hass, who was the Haaretz newspaper’s correspondent in the occupied territories, Gaza and the West Bank, for decades, I believe she’s still in Ramallah. The text on “Our children will ask: how could you (inflict the injustices and atrocities inflicted on the Palestinians for so many years)?” is based on one of her writings.


The credits also include two great musicians, with whom you’ve worked frequently in the past.

Louis Sclavis came from France to be present on the set, and played while we filmed – you can see him in the picture, with his saxophone. And Alexei Kochetkov, who lives in Berlin, happened to be in Tel Aviv when the film project took shape. I sang him a tune my father used to play on his violin, and on this basis he composed what became the film's main musical phrase. Louis Sclavis improvises while we’re shooting, whereas the pieces composed by Alexei Kochetkov were recorded beforehand. I often listen to them again in the morning before leaving for the shoot. And sometimes we play them on the set while we're shooting.


Obviously, the film was conceived and made before October 7, the Hamas terrorist attacks and the Israeli army’s war to destroy Gaza. But it is appearing in the public arena at a time when these events have already taken place, and it inevitably resonates with them too. How do you see the film’s position in this situation?

After October 7 and what followed, I hesitated, I wondered what to do, I considered not releasing the film, or modifying it. In the end, I decided to show it exactly as it was made. It seems to me that the film is internally coherent, and that what is shown in it can also be shared in today’s context. Perhaps, given the proliferation of rhinoceroses, it offers an even more relevant approach.


WORLD PREMIERE

• Berlinale Special 2024

CREDITS

Written and directed by Amos Gitai

Inspired by Rhinoceros, Eugène Ionesco

Cinematography Eric Gautier

Sound Ronen Nagel, Stéphane Thiébaut

Music Alexey Kochetkov, Louis Sclavis

Editing Yuval Orr, Simon Birman

Set Design Arie Weiss

Additional texts Marie-José Sanselme, Rivka Gitai


Cast Irène Jacob, Hanna Laslo, Yael Abecassis, Bahira Ablassi, Menashe Noy, Pini Mittelman, Atallah Tannous, Minas Qarawany, Amnon Rechter, Naama Preis


Producers Amos Gitai, Laurent Truchot, Ilan Moskovitch, Catherine Dussart, Shuki Friedman

Executive producer Jeremy Thomas

Coproducers Alexandre Iordachescu, João Queiroz Filho, Gilles Masson, Nathalie Varagnat, Moshe Edery, Alan Terpins, Marcello Brennand, Lisabeth Sander, Luiz Simões Lopes Neto

World sales Visit Films

Produced by AGAV Films,  Recorded Picture Company, CDP, Elefant Films, Ventre Studio, United King Films, GAD Fiction, Intereurop

Inspired by Eugène Ionesco’s play, the film recounts the emergence of intolerance and totalitarian thinking through a series of day-to-day episodes that take place in Israel in a single building, the Shikun. In this hybrid group of people of different origins and languages, some turn into rhinoceroses, but others resist. An ironic metaphor for life in our contemporary societies.


INTERVIEW WITH AMOS GITAI

What does the title Shikun mean?

There was a debate about the title between two options, the second being It’s Not Over Yet, based on the song you hear in the film. My friends in Tel Aviv prefer the second title, which will also be the title of the film in Israel, but I prefer Shikun, which in Hebrew means “social housing”, a building for people to live in. The word comes from a verb meaning “to shelter”, “to give refuge”. And the film gives shelter to people who, for different reasons, need refuge from the threat of rhinos. I like the sound of the word, I know that most people won’t know what it means, but that doesn’t bother me, on the contrary. There’s something abstract about it that suits me, that's in the spirit of the project.


How would you describe the process that led to the making of this film?

The film was born in relation to what was then the context in Israel, before October 7. We were in the middle of a huge protest movement against the attempt by Netanyahu and his far-right government to reform the legal system, with large demonstrations bringing together feminist groups, soldiers, academics, economists, people campaigning for peaceful coexistence between Palestinians and Israelis and a large section of civil society against the destruction of the democratic legal system. This movement was also a reaction to the rise of a form of conformism, the disappearance of the critical spirit, in Israeli society. It was in this context that I re-read Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros, written at the end of the 1950s as an anti-totalitarian fable, and which seemed to me to echo what we were experiencing. I saw in it the possibility of inspiration for a film about the present we were living in. At the time, I was rehearsing in Tel Aviv the stage version of House, the play inspired by my 1980 film. The whole cast was there, including Irène Jacob and the Palestinian actress Bahira Ablassi. At the same time as we were working on the play, we got collectively involved in this project, which I wrote quite quickly. I called the cinematographer Eric Gautier, with whom I’ve worked on four of my previous films over the last twelve years, and he arrived straight away. We were able to put together the material conditions and shoot without delay, thanks also to the complicity of the producers, technicians and artists with whom I have this long relationship of collaboration and friendship.


Was the film as we see it written beforehand, or was it more the result of improvisation and invention during the shoot?

It was largely written. The first part was entirely scripted, for this particular building, whose architecture helps me to structure the story, to organise the way we see the cohabitation and interference of the very different people who live there. It creates a spatial unit where Israelis, Palestinians, Ukrainians and so on move around. All these people belong to everyday reality, and among them is a special person, played by Irène Jacob, who is frightened by the emergence of these creatures, the rhinoceroses. She is the character most directly inspired by Ionesco’s play, even playing several of the play’s opposing protagonists.


We know how important architecture is to your work, from your studies at the University of California at Berkeley to films directly linked to a building, such as the trilogy House-A House in Jerusalem-News from Home, or your series of portraits of leading figures in Israeli architecture. What is the building in which the film is set?

It’s a well-known building, said to be the longest in the Middle East, at over 250 metres long. And it is indeed a shikun, a social housing building. It stands in the town of Beer-Sheva in the centre of the Negev desert in southern Israel. The building itself is a powerful architectural gesture, in the spirit of Le Corbusier, a kind of coup de force, a statement in the middle of the desert. Its spatial organisation, perspectives, angles and building materials help me to bring these different characters and activities to life in contiguous ways, which can be conflicting or simply ignore each other, without having to create artificial sequences, series of causes and effects, as too many films force themselves to do. The film is about the chaos of the world, the chaos created by war, economic inequality and injustice. Most films tend to sugarcoat this chaos by assembling logical, psychological, sociological and other explanations for behaviour, which reassures the audience. But in my view this is a delusion, a dishonesty. Reality is the result of heterogeneous forces, chance and illogical interference. And in the midst of all this, there is an active force: fear. Fear is not a given, it is constructed, it is manufactured, and leaders like Trump, Netanyahu, Orban, Putin, etc. are engineers of fear, and obviously so is Hamas. They thrive on the feeling of fear that they produce and maintain. This is what rhinoceroses represent metaphorically, and this is what we must resist.


Shikun belongs to a group of films you’ve made that are characterised by what you might call a semi-enclosed camera: recently, Laila in Haifa, A Tramway in Jerusalem, Ana Arabia, or even going back to Alila. They are all set entirely within a delimited space, but with glimpses of the outside world in one way or another.

Yes, each time it’s the project of exploring a microcosm with the ambition that it will reflect a more general truth. In much the same way as the study of a cell would provide a representation of, and information about, an entire living body. This unity of place, and indeed also of time, implies some fairly radical formal choices, which organise the flow of movement and make the forces that concentrate and oppose each other visible. One of these directorial choices is clearly the use of the sequence shot – which I took to extremes for Ana Arabia, filmed in a single shot. But the precise answers are different each time; the sequence shots in Shikun are not the same as in my other films, and neither is the editing.


You mentioned the chaos of the world that the film aims to portray, but at the same time there is a highly choreographed aspect to all the movements – with great use made of this new filmmaking tool, the trotinette.

We worked a lot on the fluidity of the shots, using the trotinette as a useful means of movement. The concerted organisation of the movements tends to create a certain formal unity, an inner dynamic, thanks to the sequence shots and the moving camera, while at the same time capturing the chaos.


How do you achieve this?

I draw a lot, and I also make numerous visits to the shooting location, with each actor and each technician, so that we can agree on the contributions and movements of each person, on the rhythms, on the framing, on the depths. My training as an architect helps me considerably. And during the shoot, I direct everyone using a large loudspeaker, so coordination is essential.


How did you work with the actors?

First, we worked on the text. I gave Irène Jacob a copy of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, which she used as a basis for her acting suggestions, and we progressed by exchanging a lot of ideas. She was very committed, and contributed a lot, including the scene where she partly strips naked, which was her idea. The film’s aim is not to provide ready-made answers, but to open up questions, provoke confusion and encourage viewers to make their own way. And neither the actors nor I know all the reasons for what's going on; it's a search for each and every one of us, a kind of quest. At best, we understand what we've done after we’ve done it. When you have sequence shots with a large number of moving protagonists and complex camera movements, you can’t improvise; you have to adjust everything to the millimeter. The film is born of this requirement, as well as of the openness of our questioning.


What about the other actors and actresses?

In each case, I started from something in common, which concerned him or her, or which served as a point of departure. For example, I know Hannah Laszlo well, who played one of the main roles in Free Zone. The book she finds in the film while rummaging through the Yiddish library is a copy that her father, a survivor of the Theresienstadt deportation camp, gave her for her bat mitzvah. The place where her character finds herself, the old, somewhat abandoned Yiddish library, actually exists. Yaël Abecassis, who has acted in six of my films since Kadosh, suggested a biblical text from the Psalms, which she transposed in relation to rhinoceroses. Bahira Ablassi, an extraordinary Palestinian actress already present in Laila in Haifa, is also very gifted in the visual field, and created the horns seen in the film, working with the decoration technicians. Etc.


The dialogues are in several languages, including Hebrew and Arabic. For those who don’t speak these languages, it can be difficult to know which one is being used.

This is deliberate, and I didn’t want the subtitles to help differentiate between them, for example by using two colors as is often done. This obviously creates a difference between those who know these languages and those who don't, which is also interesting. The fact that there’s uncertainty for people who don’t come from this region, who don’t know the languages, is part of the film’s proposition. Above all, I don’t want to be didactic.


In addition to the central reference to Ionesco, the film also draws on other literary references.

Yes, it ends with a poem by Mahmood Darwish, Think of others, there’s also a passage from Umberto Eco, on cowardice, and also a text by Israeli journalist and writer Amira Hass, who was the Haaretz newspaper’s correspondent in the occupied territories, Gaza and the West Bank, for decades, I believe she’s still in Ramallah. The text on “Our children will ask: how could you (inflict the injustices and atrocities inflicted on the Palestinians for so many years)?” is based on one of her writings.


The credits also include two great musicians, with whom you’ve worked frequently in the past.

Louis Sclavis came from France to be present on the set, and played while we filmed – you can see him in the picture, with his saxophone. And Alexei Kochetkov, who lives in Berlin, happened to be in Tel Aviv when the film project took shape. I sang him a tune my father used to play on his violin, and on this basis he composed what became the film's main musical phrase. Louis Sclavis improvises while we’re shooting, whereas the pieces composed by Alexei Kochetkov were recorded beforehand. I often listen to them again in the morning before leaving for the shoot. And sometimes we play them on the set while we're shooting.


Obviously, the film was conceived and made before October 7, the Hamas terrorist attacks and the Israeli army’s war to destroy Gaza. But it is appearing in the public arena at a time when these events have already taken place, and it inevitably resonates with them too. How do you see the film’s position in this situation?

After October 7 and what followed, I hesitated, I wondered what to do, I considered not releasing the film, or modifying it. In the end, I decided to show it exactly as it was made. It seems to me that the film is internally coherent, and that what is shown in it can also be shared in today’s context. Perhaps, given the proliferation of rhinoceroses, it offers an even more relevant approach.


WORLD PREMIERE

• Berlinale Special 2024

CREDITS

Written and directed by Amos Gitai

Inspired by Rhinoceros, Eugène Ionesco

Cinematography Eric Gautier

Sound Ronen Nagel, Stéphane Thiébaut

Music Alexey Kochetkov, Louis Sclavis

Editing Yuval Orr, Simon Birman

Set Design Arie Weiss

Additional texts Marie-José Sanselme, Rivka Gitai


Cast Irène Jacob, Hanna Laslo, Yael Abecassis, Bahira Ablassi, Menashe Noy, Pini Mittelman, Atallah Tannous, Minas Qarawany, Amnon Rechter, Naama Preis


Producers Amos Gitai, Laurent Truchot, Ilan Moskovitch, Catherine Dussart, Shuki Friedman

Executive producer Jeremy Thomas

Coproducers Alexandre Iordachescu, João Queiroz Filho, Gilles Masson, Nathalie Varagnat, Moshe Edery, Alan Terpins, Marcello Brennand, Lisabeth Sander, Luiz Simões Lopes Neto

World sales Visit Films

Produced by AGAV Films,  Recorded Picture Company, CDP, Elefant Films, Ventre Studio, United King Films, GAD Fiction, Intereurop


SALES / DISTRIBUTION

AGAV FILMS

Laurent Truchot
6, cour Berard. 75004 Paris – France

+33 (0)1 42 40 48 45

ltruchot@gmail.com

SALES / DISTRIBUTION

AGAV FILMS

6, cour Berard. 75004 Paris

France

+33 (0)1 42 40 48 45

agav@amosgitai.com

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