Extremism and fake news, well, incite people to hate and worse, kill one another. Audiences can blame this contemporary worldwide problem to social media and bogus internet sites. But Yaron Zilberman’s second film feature Incitement shows extremism’s presence before social media existed.
Men like our protagonist Yigal Amir (Yehuda Nahari Halevi) surrounds himself with propaganda. He was free to roam his home country, Israel, during 1995 when radio was king. And those radio stations would spread lies about Yitzhak Rabin, lies that Yigal believed.
Yigal also saw the terrorism from both Israeli and Palestinian extremists in his television. The film also shows how he interpreted things like the Torah and rabbinical preaching. The Torah is a beautiful book that he turned into an ethnocentric piece of literature.
Yigal, by the way, is a real person who assassinated Yitzhak Rabin. The film ends with that assassination, an interesting choice that makes for structural problems. Namely, it just leaves us audiences to wait for that end point to happen.
This means that we’re spending two hours watching people not dissuading him from extremism. Which is, of course, not the job of the lovely people in his life. People like his then girlfriend Nava (Daniella Keretsz) just want Yigal to be normal.
And sure, that structural choice relegates his actions’s dire consequences to an epilogue. But surprisingly, that doesn’t take away from Zilberman turning this into a sensory experience. His sound and visual choices are both pronounced yet subtle, showing hatred’s personal impact.
For more information go to https://www.tiff.net/events/incitement.
- Release Date: 9/7/2019
