Local filmmaker fascinated by Judaism and Israel

Igal Hecht

In some ways, Igal Hecht’s approach to making documentary films is quite hands-off.

The Israeli-Canadian filmmaker, 37, and founder of Chutzpa Productions, has been determined to avoid what he calls the “North American, Michael Moore-style” of self-insertion in his movies.

“I hate that idea of, ‘I’m the director and I’m going to be the champion,’” Hecht explained. “My job is to allow the people who I came to make the film about to be at the forefront.”

Having directed close to 40 films, a number of which have been shown at international film festivals both Jewish and not, his most recent projects include Daughters of Eve, a docudrama television mini-series set to air in North America next fall, about iconic women from the Old and New Testaments and A Woman’s Story, a film by director Azra Rashid that Hecht co-produced, about female survivors of 20th century genocides.

He recently teamed up with distribution company Syndicado, which is in the process of showcasing a dozen or so of his documentaries on video on demand web sites such as Vimeo, Amazon and Hulu – eight have already been posted.

While he avoids the spotlight in his movies, Hecht hardly shies away from looking at controversial issues from a certain slant – indeed, he said the very spirit of his production company is to address matters “no one wants to talk about” – and his oeuvre contains numerous films on political and social issues in Israel and Palestine, including Israel’s 2005 disengagement from Gaza, the Israeli settler movement and LGBTQ Palestinians living in Israel. In Not in My Name, produced in 2005, Hecht examines the political Jewish left in North America.

“I disagree with a lot of the Jewish left. I think they’re shielding anti-Semitism,” Hecht said. “But I still wanted them to have their say. I presented counter-arguments and then let the viewer decide who they want to believe or not believe.”

In Disengaging Democracy, made in 2006, he takes a hard look at the effects of Israel’s unilateral pullout from Gaza on Jewish settlers in Gush Katif, underscoring the settlers’ pain at being evacuated from their homes, their inability to find suitable homes or work following the evacuation, their sense of injustice at what they felt was insufficient support and infrastructure from government after the fact and the Israeli media’s failure to report on their struggles.

The film’s follow-up, The Hilltops, which premiered at the 2011 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Film Festival, looks at leaders within the Jewish settler community in the West Bank as they campaign to hold onto what they perceive as biblically-inherited land.

Hecht disagrees with criticism that  The Hilltops is a pro-settler movie. “I just try to present the reality that exists…I don’t think it’s a [pro-settler movie], but what I didn’t do – that is commonly done to settlers – is I didn’t demonize them.”

He stressed he’s not an advocate for settlers, nor does he agree with many of their views, but wished to highlight the ways the Gaza withdrawal represented a breakdown in Israeli democracy.

“It was shameful. The media was so hell-bent on having the disengagement go through, they decided they were going to avoid asking certain questions and omit facts,” he said. “Top members of the Israeli media later conceded they’d lied, and that they didn’t talk about what would happen after the pullout.”

After five or six years spent making films about weighty political situations, Hecht said he began to feel somewhat burnt out.

His later works, then, like television show Muzika, which explores voices in contemporary Israeli music and has aired weekly in North America for several years, and the acclaimed A Universal Language (2013), which documents six Canadian Yuk Yuk comedians as they tour Israel, have been more socially or culturally-focused.

 “A lot of filmmakers want to focus on the bad [in Israel], and while there are a lot of contentious issues there, the political is not the only thing that defines it,” Hecht said.

He is particularly interested in capturing women’s issues around the world, he said. For A Woman’s Story, he and Rashid traveled to Bangladesh, Rwanda and Poland to document the experiences of three separate women who are survivors of three separate genocides, one being the Holocaust. 

While he hopes to continue evolving beyond making films exclusively about Israel, Hecht said it remains a significant interest of his.

“Judaism and Israel have always fascinated me. The world of diaspora Jewry is fascinating – more so today than before,” he said.

 

For a complete look at Hecht’s films visit his company’s website at www.chutzpaproductions.com