Milim is an historic parable looking at the issue of social discord. Where Amos Gitaï in his The Arena of Murder (see here) stops and looks at the meaning of the murder by a fellow countryman of Yitzhak Rabin, in Milim he goes a step further. The divisions within the Jewish people acquire an historic dimension when Gitaï falls back on a war from the distant past, a war described by Josephus Flavius in The Jewish Wars: The armed rebellion of the Jewish people against the Roman Empire in 66 AD, that resulted in the fall of Massada in 73 AD. Flavius, commander of the Jewish army that was eventually defeated by the Romans, was able to save his own life by writing a history of this war from the Roman perspective. In his eventual written history, Flavius did not hide his sympathy for his compatriots but pointed out that the Jews were subject to internal conflicts and rivalries. The murder of Rabin resounds like the echo of a civil war from the distant past.Milim is a meditation on mourning, in which images of Israel in travelling shots from right to left (like Hebrew writing) are combined with Flavius’ texts that are declaimed by e.g. Sam Fuller, Hanna Schygulla, Enrico Lo Verso and Jerome Koenig. The film, shot on location in Venice, Israel and Poland, is emphatically not a feature, but also far from documentary.
