Page - 109 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 05/01

relationship between fathers and sons and between the secular and the sa- cred: parallels with the Bible are turned upside down to revise the relationship between war and peace, Zionism and religion, and understandings of meta-nar- ratives for the land and its people. While it could be viewed as an attempt to make Zionism “more Jewish” through its engagement of a religious narrative, Madmony’s film rather reflects the confusion in separating the religious and secular. A Place in Heaven reinforces at first the biblical narrative of the land: cine- matic space frames the land as site on which the main character works, to gain the woman of his life, to win her father’s trust, to enable new growth from the soil. However, the biblical narrative is inverted when he gains his wife, for the land they inhabit (the flat they buy) is Palestinian. They become occupiers of geographical space: the edges of the filmic frame are constantly filled – deserts and woodland landscapes are there “to be conquered”, as the main character puts it. The film reinforces geographical space as a problematic site on which personal and political relationships are (re)negotiated. Enclosed physical spaces enveloped with dark foggy lights make up the mise- en-scène of A Place in Heaven, where father and son interrogate one another, where the notion of sharing a place (a life, a relationship, a physical boundary such as a flat) becomes essentially impossible (for the son). Space is marked by the sins of the fathers and the rebellious relationship of the sons. Through the union of temporal and extra-temporal via physical space, A Place in Heaven indicates that heaven and earth, and likewise good and evil, are intertwined and cannot easily be separated.10 Finally, by connecting the temporal and ex- tra-temporal Madmony explores the possibility of forgiveness: the son holds a Kaddish for his deceased father and the father can be seen at the end wander- ing through an open field with the rabbi who bought his place in heaven. The uncertainty of the film lies in the uncertainty of salvation for both fathers and sons. Madmony does not reconcile the secular and sacred spheres. The cine- matic space is used to confront them, leaving the resolution to the audience. Gitai takes a more critical view of religion in his Kadosh, where he explores the life and troubled position of women within the Orthodox community Mea Shearim. Gitai is aware of the complexity of the question of what defines a Jew, a product of “the coherence, in Judaism, between an ethnic, even national, identity and a religious conception”11 and of the variety of standpoints even within the religious (Orthodox) communities, from those who “oppose the 10 Madmony refers to the belief that sometimes something good can come even out of evil circumstan- ces. Joseph Madmony, Personal Interview, 30.07.2018. 11 Amos Gitai, Interview by Marie-Jose Sanselme: Kadosh (Amos Gitai, IL/FR, 1999) British DVD Release, Planet, 2002. Constructing Space, Changing Reality of Israel through Film | 109www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/1