Cinema Crimes: Netalie Braun in Conversation with Mark Danner

Interview transcript below

Cinema Crimes

On the ethics of people with cameras

Details

Shooting

Director: Netalie Braun

Israel, 2025, 80m

Screens with

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Netalie Braun tells three stories of cameras and war: the filming of a battle scene that leads to the fleeing of a whole village in the Golan Heights; a Palestinian family in East Jerusalem who are confronting an action scene in their house; and a film worker who struggles to cope with the guilt and confusion caused by his life and work within his battle-torn and morally fraught Israeli society. Braun spoke with Mark Danner about the ways in which Israeli cinema reenacts and supports the Israeli military machine.

Mark Danner

Your film questions the ethics of reenactment, and it seems like a self-critique of documentary practice. Can you talk about that?

Netalie Braun

The boy in one of the films asks me, “Why do you make films if your cameras are blind?” I didn’t have an answer to his question. And then the cinematographer Adam Greenberg asks me, “Wouldn’t you do anything for a good scene?” I think that the film raises a lot of a lot of ethical questions and about the connection between art cinema and documentary films and the problems in Israeli society.

Mark Danner

In the film, you refuse to draw conclusions. You leave the stories for the viewer, and the viewer is forced is forced to draw conclusions. Morally, that makes it a much more powerful document. There’s no talking heads, or no one is underlying the points at all.

Netalie Braun

I think about the first two films as being crimes of cinema. The third story is about trauma from a war crime that the subject tries to deal with through cinema. I prefer telling stories and I put them near each other because I want the audience to think about the connections. There are many connections and thoughts that can be revealed in the dialogue between the three stories.

Mark Danner

The film reverberates so powerfully at this moment. I know the relationship between when a film is made and when it is released is arbitrary. But when I finished, I thought, it is made for this moment. Do you agree with that?

Netalie Braun

It’s a radical time now. Many issues that are raised in the film are being a bit suppressed in Israeli society, or maybe all over the world. Telluride will be the first audience outside of Israel to see the film. But the home-based audience is receiving the film with great emotions.

Mark Danner

The film also implicates the audience. In the film a performance for a movie causes the exile of villagers from the Golan Heights. I felt like I was participating by watching. But, it’s not the viewers who are making a moral error. It’s the moral error of the filmmaker, who is careless or uncaring. Is this an essay on your own guilt as a filmmaker?

Netalie Braun

Yes, it is. And I’m touched by your reading. When you make something, you want so badly for people to understand it.

The film is about Israeli cinema. Yes, it’s also about cinema in general, but the specific examples and stories are connected to our very specific reality, our society. Yes, I do feel guilt. I began to work on the film almost six years ago, before the current war. But the occupation didn’t begin on October 7. Every aspect in our society is connected to the occupation. I feel our collective guilt. As we turn our cameras to criticize many phenomena in our society. I wanted to take the camera and to turn it to towards itself, towards my colleagues and towards me as a cinematographer. I wanted to say that nothing about our work is clean.

Mark Danner

Cinema Crimes: Netalie Braun in Conversation with Mark Danner

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