A Film a Week - 40 Steps

 previously published on Cineuropa

Hatred is taught, but so is tolerance. An attempt to do so in a very specific situation is the central topic of the documentary 40 Steps, written and directed by Gad Aisen and Manor Birman, which has just premiered at Docaviv, where it also triumphed in the Beyond the Screen Competition.

The title of the film refers to the distance between two schools that share a playground in the Shapira neighbourhood, in the southern part of Tel Aviv. One of them, Shapira Neighbourhood School, is public, while the other, Shorashim State-Religious School is, well, religious. The former is attended by students coming from the ranks of the secular people in the area, many of whom are immigrants and refugees from Palestine, Africa and the former Soviet Union, while the second is attended by the Orthodox Jewish kids who are descendants of the immigrants from the previous waves. The trouble is rooted in the past, specifically some 100 years ago, when Shapira was founded by the Jews looking for cheaper land than that which was available in fast-growing Tel Aviv, and for peace and quiet, which was not the case in Jaffa. Since 1924, Shapira has become home to countless waves of Jewish immigrants and refugees from different parts of the world, but the most recent influx that the neighbourhood has witnessed has brought people who are not religious, or even Jewish at all, whom the “natives” see as a threat.

It is up to the two heads of the schools, Shahar and Elior, to make things work while not betraying the principles that both of the institutions were founded on. They have to find a common language to reconcile both of the opposing cultures, while also dealing with the personal problems of their students and their parents, plus the wider problems of the community, such as the pressure from gentrification and the division of the population along several fault lines (other than the best-known Israeli-Palestinian conflict, there are also tensions between the religious and the secular, the European and the African, and between generations of immigrants), which can result in protests that verge on violence.

The filmmaking duo takes a humanist perspective, which prevents them from being objective or neutral, but nevertheless, they try to provide the necessary screen time for both sides, represented by the two protagonists and a gallery of supporting characters (the students, their parents, and the heads’ own parents, spouses and children) in each camp. Sometimes, they unearth the absurdities inherent in this society (the leader of the organisation behind the protests against the “infiltrators” is a former leftist and peace activist who also belongs to marginalised societal groups, being a woman, a lesbian and a child of Holocaust survivors), but their primary goal is to provide a sympathetic ear for both sides and to convey a message of tolerance.

On the level of its craft, 40 Steps is decent and thorough, while not exactly an innovative film. The semi-observational approach (the subjects rarely talk directly to the camera, which follows them around closely) fits the material. The switches between the semi-close-ups shot by Aisen and the aerial drone shots and 3D graphics add to the dynamics, while the rapid editing by Noga Weizman, which employs a jump cut here and there, keeps the tempo upbeat for the whole of the doc’s 78 minutes.