The film Golda is a biopic of Golda Meir, Israel’s first prime minister, but it covers an era of less than three weeks.
The film follows Meir, played through an unrecognizable Helen Mirren, as she navigates the tense 19 days of the Yom Kippur War in 1973.
The clash resulted in numerous Israeli casualties, widespread complaints about the government’s unpreparedness and, ultimately, Meir’s resignation.
“She said, ‘It’s my fault and I’m going to resign,'” director Guy Nattiv said. “Show me who will do this today. “
The film focuses on an ancient time and the pioneering figure who led the country during that time, says Nattiv, who was born in Israel that same year.
And he says it’s applicable today given what’s happening in Israel, where the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu is taking steps to weaken the country’s judicial formula despite protests. Yom Kippur War veterans (wearing T-shirts that say so) were among those who took to the streets, he added.
Nattiv says the film is about leaders “who couldn’t see each other, couldn’t see a meter away, couldn’t see the front, couldn’t see themselves, couldn’t see what was happening. “
“And that’s precisely what’s happening now, 50 years later,” he adds.
For example, he says Israeli leaders seem to forget the danger posed by the fact that many reservists refuse to serve (arguing, as he describes it, that they are fighting “for the kingdom, for the king”).
She says the fact that Meir believed in the judicial formula is one of the differences between her and Netanyahu.
“He had ideas about people. She didn’t think about herself. That’s why he took responsibility,” he said. He left with a wonderful misfortune because he cared about those soldiers. Benjamin Netanyahu cares about one person: himself. “
The film hits U. S. theaters on Friday, despite several thousand people seeing it at the Jerusalem Film Festival last month. Nattiv, the second Israeli director to win an Oscar in 2019, says the screening sparked a “very moving” reaction.
He said the audience told him, “Thank you for clarifying Golda’s call and this film as a lesson about what’s happening lately in Israel. “
Nattiv describes Meir as a desirable figure: “He is not an ordinary soldier, but an ordinary [statesman], and that is the only thing that saved us. “
Her family moved from posh Ukraine to the United States to escape anti-Semitic violence as a child.
He moved to Palestine before World War II, working with Jewish task forces before entering local politics. After Israel became a state in 1948, Meir (who was one of the signers of its Declaration of Independence) rose through the ranks of the government. as a member of parliament, then Minister of Hard Work and Minister of Foreign Affairs.
Meir became Israel’s fourth prime minister (and only the fourth woman elected to head a government in the world) in 1969, following the sudden death of her predecessor. At the time, she was seventy years old and secretly undergoing treatment for lymphoma (she died from the disease in 1978).
The film shows Meir, a heavy smoker, smoking cigarettes during her cancer treatments.
Nattiv says it’s one of many private points the filmmakers learned by consulting some of the other people who knew Meir best: his press secretary Meron Medzini and his bodyguard Adam Snir.
“Everything you see in this movie is true, it’s based on those other people and those who knew her,” he adds. “I basically smoked 30 packs a day, drank 30 black [coffees] a day and didn’t eat. She was committing suicide the same way the country was committing suicide. “
Nattiv attributes this to the strain of his work, beyond the trauma, whether from his upbringing in Ukraine or from new memories of the Holocaust, which had occurred just three decades earlier.
And he needs the audience to feel the same way Meir felt as he watched the war spread from afar.
“I thought that since Golda couldn’t go to the front, because she’s older and sick, I wanted to bring the war to the rooms, to these closed, claustrophobic, smoke-filled rooms,” he says. adding that the film includes genuine sound clips of the front lines.
One area where the film doesn’t go into much detail, however, is the joy and attention of Palestinians, with the exception of a segment that shows some being driven out of their villages.
Nattiv acknowledges that he may have done more to show the Palestinians’ position in the bigger picture, but that Meir – who once said that “Palestinians don’t exist” – may also have done more for them.
Documents declassified earlier this summer suggest the prime minister considered the option of forming a Palestinian state. But Nattiv, who describes Meir as a hawk, says he probably “focuses more on survival, less on the Palestinian question. “
A small ancient reminder of the Yom Kippur War: A coalition of Arab states led by Egyptian and Syrian forces introduced a coordinated attack on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, catching Israel off guard and triggering a confrontation that would spread and involve the United States. The United States and the Soviet Union.
Israeli forces repulsed the Arab armies’ achievements, but at a significant cost: only about 2,7,000 infantrymen were killed, more than 7,000 wounded, and only about three hundred were captured.
It also dealt an emotional blow to the country, ending the sense of invincibility that many Israelis had felt following the 1967 Six-Day War, which more than tripled the length of the territory under their control.
“After the Six-Day War, when Israel felt like the king of the Middle East, it received a giant slap. And they understood that they really weren’t,” Nattiv says.
The Israelis overwhelmingly criticized the government for what they saw as a lack of preparation, adding to its inability to take warnings of a nearby attack seriously, make full use of its intelligence in neighboring countries, and talk to the enemy (a technique Nattiv considers illustrated). ). . by the Holocaust).
Meir took over the government’s shortcomings and resigned in 1974. Nattiv describes her as “the scapegoat of war. “
He was later absolved of his direct duty by intelligence errors and, according to Nattiv, played a pivotal role in securing very important assistance from the United States.
This is largely due to his friendly relationship with then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who starred in Liev Schreiber’s film. Kissinger, now 100, met with Schrieber before filming to discuss his encounters with Meir (and provided a heated exchange). appears in the trailer. )
Much of the discussion before the film’s release centered on the casting of Mirren, who is Jewish and relied on a lot of makeup and prosthetics to play Meir.
The ongoing debate over Jewish representation in movies has resurfaced in recent weeks, stoked by Bradley Cooper’s upcoming and questionable role as Leonard Bernstein, dressed in what many have criticized as an unnecessarily giant prosthetic nose.
Mirren told the Daily Mail this week that the complaint about her decision to play Meir, because she is Jewish, is “completely legitimate” and that she herself had raised the matter with the filmmakers before accepting the role.
Nattiv says it was Meir’s grandson, Gideon, who came up with the idea of Mirren signing up for the project.
“He said, ‘I see my grandmother when I see Helen, I see her,'” he said, adding that the film’s actors obviously agreed. He does too, calling it “phenomenal. “
Mirren spent three-and-a-half hours a day on Meir’s makeup trailer, she says. And she says she physically and mentally embodied the former prime minister, adopting tactics such as walking and talking slowly.
“I didn’t see Helen for forty-five days. I saw Golda,” he adds. Because when they brought me to the set, she was already Golda. When they took us home, he removed all the prosthetics from his face, the adjustments and “Everything. So I barely remembered what Helen Mirren was like. “
The broadcast interview was produced by Phil Harrell and edited by Jacob Conrad.