Page - 107 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 05/01

constitute communities within Israel’s wider socio-political reality are built and confronted through the cinematic space. The cinema thus becomes a site in which existing realities are reflected and new realities are constructed, open- ing up possibilities for transformation.5 In other words, how film frames alter- nate reality(ies) is related to the construction of space, as will be addressed in this article specifically in terms of how filmmakers interrogate and transform the reality of Israel on-screen and thus propose an alternative way of being and coexisting. This reality can continue off-screen, inspiring or producing change in society, but this continuation is only an aftereffect of the rupture produced on-screen. This article focuses on two Israeli films: West of the Jordan River (Amos Gitai, IL/FR 2017) and Geula (Redemption, Joseph Madmony / Boaz Yehonatan Yacov, IL 2018). I juxtapose these two diametrically different films in order to as- sess the ways in which the cinematic space functions as a direct site for negoti- ating identities, religious belonging and communities’ relation to the geograph- ical space of Israel.6 The political borders of the geographical space of Israel are not clearly defined, the problem upon which Amos Gitai’s film focuses. While Gitai questions the conflict, reconciliation and identities of Israeli-Palestinian space, Madmony and Yacov focus on the inner struggle of a character caught in between two spaces: that of the Orthodox community and the surrounding world. The selection of these films is based on their wholly different approaches to the socio-political reality of Israel (Gitai looks largely at the implications of the secular and Madmony/Yacov at the sacred) and their differing but equally rigorous construction of space. The analysis of these two films aims to sharpen our focus on cinematic space as a continuum in which such complex realities are expressed, renegotiated and transformed. AMOS GITAI AND JOSEPH MADMONY: RELIGION AND THE TROUBLE OF IDENTITY(IES) Religion has been explored in Israeli cinema as related to a national-ethic identi- ty and a sense of belonging on both a micro-level (to a certain community) and a macro-level (to the political community that is the state, or, indeed, in rejecting belonging to the state). Religion in Israel has been a matter of extensive ongo- 5 Furthermore, as I argue elsewhere, cinematic space bears the potential for transforming reality. See Radovic 2017. 6 I referred earlier in the text to Israel as “a land” because I am considering the physicality of the ge- ographical space as depicted in the films. However, as we shall see, filmmakers further define and renegotiate the physicality of the land as the state and the cultural and political space. The changing borders and the new settlements in the West Bank indicate that geography as political space is not precisely defined. Constructing Space, Changing Reality of Israel through Film | 107www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/1