The Gatekeepers

The Oscar Nominated Film’s Website
&
The Trailer:

My review – [Attention: this film does not fit any category nor any short blurb.]

“seeing the state as a value is the essence of the fascist conception” & “the sacred cow of national unity”
Yeshayahu Leibowitz
The film may inspire one to consult (again?) Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s important book, Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State.

The short of it:
This is not a mea-culpa-film trying to exonerate Israel’s secret services, it is an indictment of the state and any institution, probably anywhere where authority is not questioned.

The slightly longer review:
To appreciate this film requires a viewer’s sustained reflection; otherwise one would fall into the “pro/against dichotomy” decried by Robert Frost  (Thinking isn’t agreeing or disagreeing. That’s voting.)
Like the tip of an iceberg (here a volcano), the film’s material represents only two percent of the interviews.
Even within such a tiny segment, one witnesses the first of a historical moment: all of the speakers – each one holding a key component of Israel’s past thirty years – struggle for the first time, so it seems, to articulate what happened.

Considering the steady erosion of Zionism’s progressive ideals and the continued occupation of the West Bank, it is easy to attack Israel.
Dror Moreh, the courageous filmmaker behind the Oscar-nominated documentary, cares enough about Israel, his country, to walk the tight rope and reveal some of its major problems. He seems to echo the words of Carl Schurz: “My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.
Politics and culture feed their passive audiences with simple answers, the difficult questions are for those who seek change.
Unfortunately The Gatekeepers is already being used as ammunition by hasty critics like Democracy Now!

We move into the future by acknowledging the past. Can this movie revolve as that axis?

What else?

• What every news channel, every storyteller promises: secrets revealed.

• In the shadow of Errol Morris’s The Fog of War, how often do you get the head of a secret organization speaking about his work?

• Here  we get six of them, each one providing one facet of the Israeli policy puzzle.

• They do so as individuals with no support from the government (which did not acknowledge the Oscar nomination).

• As if entering one (only one) chess player’s mind, we assume we witness “the best Israeli thinking” – a possible let down for some. While Jewish survival is the carrot touted by each government, as in a suspenseful detective story where life and destruction comingle – for this reviewer with echoes of the movie Shoah – each moment is both precious and precise.

Like most important work, it disturbs.
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Dror Moreh with the Film Society Program Director and NYFF Selection Committee Chairman Richard Peña, Oct. 2012: