Venue: Side Cinema
Dates: Tuesday 23rd March
Time: 7pm
Director Georgi Lazarevski France 2007 / 52 min
Certificate NC / In Arabic with English Subtitles
A group of senior citizens cared for in the Catholic run nursing home Our Lady of Sorrows in Israel’s West Bank learn to live with the everyday changes, restrictions, disappointments, and surprises created when Israel builds the Wall of Separation just metres from their front door. Our Lady of Sorrows, an incidental victim of the wall’s zigzag through the West Bank, has fallen on the Israeli side. For these elderly Palestinians, it is the “wrong” side.
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Anonymous 
LE JARDIN DE JAD
REVIEW
BY
LEON BELL
Lazarevski’s documentary is an example of making a sow’s ear out of a silk purse. The subject is a Catholic old people’s home, which is now on the wrong side of the divide as the Israeli Wall of Separation is built. How can a film-maker go wrong? There’s certainly nothing wrong with the elderly inhabitants. There are more character faces than in a Sergio Leone spaghetti western. Jad, an old worker, acts as proxy interviewer. His actions rarely feel his own.
An air of inauthenticity pervades as if Lazarevski had already decided the story he wanted to find and lacked faith in his subjects. This manifests itself in the use of props such as a balloon and kaleidoscope. Melancholy breaks through when the full implications of the wall begin to dawn but his subjects are not allowed to breathe.
Add to this the fact that there are scenes where everyone talks ‘on the nose’ as if they have been privy to a storyline document and it feels like a set-up. It is reminiscent of Curb Your Enthusiasm, not helped by the look of the digital video and the woodwind soundtrack. Documentary makers must have been digging their nails into their armrests in frustration.
Le Jardin de Jad
In this movie two parallel worlds are colliding into one impotent confrontation. On one side there is a personal and internal world of elderly people in the home care dealing with their own every day difficulties, and on the other side an external world of imposed political power demonstrated by the construction of the security wall.
At the same time as the audience gradually understand the nature of issues held in the home care and sympathise with its occupants, the monstrous wall finishes its shape and as an obstacle slowly penetrates in the internal world of the residential home.
The smooth waves of tragedy, comedy, happiness and sadness are composing both, the emotional picture and irrational nods that tempt to be unlaced. The alternation of these waves adds to the story in the same time dozes of empathy and irritation.
The overall feeling from the movie is impressive not only because the story is told in coherent and very delicate way, but mainly because of its ability to demonstrate such a complex socio-political background in simple and pleasant narrative.
I think Jardin de Jad is a fantastic film. It seems to resist comment because it is on the surface really very uncomplicated. A documentary maker spends some time filming in and around an old peoples home whilst the ‘peace wall’ is being constructed a stones throw away.
The sensitive portrayal of the elderly and of caring is always moving but it’s lent more meaning in this film because the eccentric frankness, madness and melancholy of the elderly residents makes perfect sense compared to the bizarre rituals of political division going on outside.
It’s not really a simple film though. There is a lot going on and it’s in fact constructed very carefully to deliver a very effective punch. While it may be manipulative I really don’t mind, it’s nice to see that powerful political documentary can be done so gently and intelligently. And apart from the usual feeling of injustice and sheer bafflement I am familiar with getting from films from that part of the world, I also felt privileged to have been introduced to these people, for whom the political situation is not the number one concern and who, in any case, wont have to endure it much longer.
Le Jardin de Jad
If my Israeli parents were to see this film, they would spend the whole time complaining of its one-sidedness. Then I would say, “But that’s the point – they’re not talking about the other side, they’re talking about this side.” And then they would react by launching into a tirade about defending the country and the wall as a safety measure. Then, I would talk about how obviously this is distancing us from a peaceful co-existence. And then my mom would interrupt and say, “so what else is new?”
This 2007 documentary film from Georgi Lazarevski feels a bit like these conversations. On one hand, he shows us the often comical nature of an aging population – an elderly woman who curses her colleague for her annoying singing but still never gets up to leave; Jad, who is often seen in beautiful long shots leisurely smoking a cigarette, and then bugging a co-worker to get his hat on straight. Each subject also expresses their view of the wall, although at times this feels forced. The wall’s effect is obvious from the striking visual imagery, and what you get from the interviews is a sense of despair and tiredness – tiredness not just from the political situation but simply from time spent on this Earth.