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 $9.99 is a new Israeli-Australian feature animation that inadvertently became the focus of one of the political brouhahas at the recent Melbourne International Film Festival. The film’s director, TATIA ROSENTHAL recently spoke with RAVE reviewer TIM MILFULL about puppets, politics, and protests.
Like it or not, first-time feature director Tatia Rosenthal recently became the focus of a messy political protest in the lead-up to the 2009 Melbourne International Film Festival, when the controversial British director Ken Loach withdrew his film Looking for Eric out of sympathy for Palestinian human rights groups. Rosenthal explains the circumstances: “[it was] a cultural boycott of Israel that went after festivals like Edinburgh and Melbourne, who accepted Israel Consulate money as participation in the festivals; only, actually, for flying Israeli filmmakers over – so a very narrow, specific bit of financing.”
The irony in this situation is that Rosenthal was working with material written by one of Palestine’s most sympathetic Israeli voices: prolific fiction writer, Etgar Keret, whose anthology features thousands of surreal and magic realist short stories. “I think [Loach] created a bit of an absurdist situation which was a bit peculiar, and I didn’t think did much to advance Middle East peace. I was astounded to find I was even finding myself having to comment on it in a way that was so narrow. There are artists in Israel who have earned their voices as political voices as well – I’m not in that place.”
Sadly, in the case of $9.99 – and also a slew of Chinese, Hong Kong and Taiwanese films withdrawn in response to MIFF’s decision to screen Ten Conditions of Love, Jeff Daniels’s documentary about Uighur separatist, Rebiya Kadeer – we seem to be moving towards a situation where festivals and film culture in general are becoming less a forum for people’s voices, and more a battlefield for political agendas.
Of course, this isn’t to suggest that literature and film haven’t been taken up before as important weapons in the fight against oppression, corruption, or abuse, but Rosenthal has found this particular experience disheartening, “I think cinema globally is such a power for change and for connecting cultures that I don’t hope to encounter much more of that in the future.”
$9.99, and many of Keret’s other stories Rosenthal argues, feature some very universal ideas that transcend the polemics of religion or nationhood, “they’re super-clever, and imaginative and entertaining. But beyond that, I think that they are very subtle and humanist, and even though they appear to be melancholy, I think that they are incredibly life-affirming.” In fact, Rosenthal’s career thus far has been linked inextricably to Keret’s work: “When I went to film school, I was a huge fan, and adapted a short story of his called Crazy Glue into an animated film. It did quite well, and he said, ‘Let’s write something longer together,’ and we wrote the screenplay for $9.99 in 1999.”
The story – an ensemble work that examines the various ways in which people “keep going with a lack of meaning” – draws together an impressive cast of mostly Australian actors, from Geoffrey Rush, Anthony LaPaglia, Samuel Johnson, and Claudia Karvan, to Ben Mendelsohn and Barry Otto, and only truly started becoming a reality after local producer Emile Sherman contacted Rosenthal with a financing plan that involved money from both Australia and Israel.
And while the film has a very art deco and deliberate Australian kind of feel, it was always meant to have universal themes: “It was never really designated to any particular location. It was going to be an “every-city” of sorts, and it was written in English, so transferring it to Australia only meant slight linguistic changes, slight location changes when there was a [site specific] reference: so instead of Florida, we had the Sunshine Coast; for soccer, we had the Socceroos, etc. But other than that, it really maintained its universal voice.” As it is, $9.99 feels like it could be anywhere from St Kilda or Miami, to somewhere in the Mediterranean like Haifa.
But the devil is in the detail in this film, and I often found myself struggling to tear my eyes away from the extraordinary, almost photorealist sets to concentrate on the characters themselves, who Rosenthal and her crew had rendered in what amounts to a contradictory impressionist style that is reminiscent of Russian iconography. “The backgrounds ended up being more realistic than initially we aimed for. Just stylising everything, making everything round-edged and funky, takes hours of reshaping… And you want to have a design that has an integrity to it, so then things were changed to have the background more realistic, but with colours and taste and tone that would still work with the more painterly puppets, that we were making impressionistic paintings for.”
The result is really quite beautiful: a carefully considered, surreal rendering of the agony of human existence.
$9.99 opens at Dendy Portside on Thursday Sep 17, rating TBC. View a trailer at www.9dollars99movie.com.
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