'Farewell Column' tells a sadly relevant story

The new Israeli movie Farewell Column (Tur Preda), which opened in theaters on Thursday, is about a difficult moment in the recent past and should resonate with audiences during the tough times the country is experiencing during the war. 

Directed by Ron Ninio, Farewell Column has a script by Ninio, best known for his television series, His Honor, but who has also had a long career directing films, and Dror Keren, who plays the lead role. Keren too, has had an acclaimed career in film, television, and stage, and has appeared in such films as Avi Nesher’s The Matchmaker and Paul Schrader’s Adam Resurrected, and he is beloved by Israeli children as the voice of Woody in the Hebrew versions of the Toy Story movies. Recently, Keren has turned to screenwriting and also co-wrote the movie, Home, with Benny Fredman. 

Farewell Column, which was filmed and is set about three years ago, tells the story of a difficult day in the life of Karmi (Keren), a political columnist who has offended some very thuggish people with a column criticizing the Netanyahu government and has just been doxxed – meaning his address and phone number have been publicly revealed – and is receiving threatening messages. His editor wants a follow-up column, but Karmi is having trouble concentrating.

The COVID pandemic is raging, and he has just moved out of the apartment he shares with his wife (Ilanit Ben-Yaakov) and daughter (Carmel Bin), because the conflicts in his marriage have become more pronounced, as they have all been stuck at home during lockdown. Their daughter wants to go to the Balfour protests in Jerusalem back when police used water cannons and force to disperse the demonstrators. His parents (Yehoshua Sobol and Jetta Monte) are bickering like children and want him to play referee.

Worst of all, perhaps, is the fact that his teenage son who is on the autism spectrum is not allowed to leave his group home due to the Coronavirus regulations. And even if he were allowed to leave and weather the next lockdown at home, which home would he go to, Karmi’s wife asks: The Airbnb that Karmi can’t afford or the family home that Karmi has just moved out of? 

That’s a lot of trouble for a single day, but Ninio and Keren pull off this mournful and moving story, anchored by Keren’s compelling performance. It’s shot in stunning black-and-white cinematography – “Our lives were not in color then,” said Ninio – and was filmed guerilla-style, shot in 17 days but not consecutively, over the course of a year, at the height of the pandemic.

“During COVID, when we in the entertainment industry were not considered ‘essential workers,’ people were stuck at home, and they really wanted to work, especially when they heard what the film was about,” he said. 

“With the script, we knew the scenes we wanted, but usually the scenes were written just before the day of shooting. We had no choice because of the lockdowns, sometimes Dror and I worked on Zoom, but wanted to be physically in the same room to write when we could,” he said. It can be a risky move for filmmakers to work this way, but in the case of Farewell Column, this on-the-fly approach gave the film a special kind of intensity. 

“It worked to our advantage,” said Ninio. “Our lives and the lives of the characters were parallel.” 

He recalled that he had to write letters to the authorities, designating actress Ben-Yaakov, who lives in Mitpeh Ramon, as an essential worker for the project, so she could travel to Tel Aviv during the lockdowns. The frightening disruptions of normal life during the pandemic color all that happens in the movie. 

A powerful depiction of autism

The part of Farewell Column I found most affecting were the scenes to do with Karmi’s autistic son, whom he desperately wants to see but cannot, since I had an almost identical experience during the pandemic when my son, who is on the autism spectrum, was not allowed to leave his residence during lockdowns. Ninio said that this storyline was inspired by a column by Haaretz columnist Rogel Alpher, who has a son on the autism spectrum and wrote about his distress and sorrow at not being allowed to hug him during lockdown. 

“Usually, he writes very sharply and in a very opinionated way against Bibi and the government and about whatever is going on in the country, and suddenly, one day, during the first lockdown he wrote a column which was titled, ‘To Embrace My Son.’ It was a completely different column... He said, ‘I don’t understand what those people in the government or in high places, what do they think? Do they think that my son is like an old person who has heart problems, he is completely healthy, but he needs a hug. I need to embrace him and I cannot do that.’ And I was so touched by that.” Ninio spoke to Alpher about using his story and column in the movie, and he agreed. 

One of these very vivid lines from the column is about how the son perceives the world, that he experiences reality like small pieces of paper blown around by a ceiling fan. Karmi feels he is beginning to see his own reality in that way, as his anguish over the government and the privations of lockdown bring him closer to understanding his son. 

This was parallel to a process that Ninio and Keren went through as they worked on the screenplay. “I understood that we’re all like an autistic human being, we’re all at a loss to understand things and we’re trying to grab these little pieces of paper, we’re not standing on the ground, but we’re falling into a void and we’re trying to make some sense out of the world.” 

This is a metaphor “for our lives as Israelis... Karmi asks, ‘Who decides if I can see my son or not? Bibi decides.’ If you jump ahead to our times now, I don’t trust any of the decisions of the government about the war, or the hostages. We are worrying in exactly the same way we did during the pandemic about the government... It’s like Karmi writes at the beginning of the film, ‘We look at the horizon and, we see Bibi, and we see darkness.’ That’s something that I wanted to convey, that we are going to a dark place and that some of the citizens of this country are trying to react to that and to demonstrate against that direction.” 

After the pandemic, when the Bennett-Lapid governments were in power, Ninio said, “I thought we would look back at this story as some dark times we had once upon a time... but Bibi came to power again and the demonstrations against the government, instead of being 15,000, they got up to around 200,000. These are bigger problems that we touch upon now.” 

Regarding the problems we are facing now, there is no way to tell the story of the film without discussing how October 7 has affected the cast and crew. 

Lior Waitzman, the sound editor, was killed during the massacre as he was out practicing for a bicycle race in Sderot. The brother of the director’s daughter-in-law was killed in Moshav Netiv HaAsara, practicing for the same bicycle race. The film’s leading lady, Ilanit Ben-Yaakov, suffered the loss of her brother, Lior Ben-Yaakov, who fought and defended people on his moshav in the Gaza Envelope region. And Mika Kalderon, an executive producer, lost her mother, who was murdered on Kibbutz Be’eri.  

“We never thought in a film crew, it would touch so many souls,” he said. “It shows you what a terrible tragedy October 7 was... The people who worked on the film were so united and so attached to each other.”

Ninio feels that the film is very relevant during the war. Sneak previews have been packed, he said. 

“People come out and say, ‘I see myself there, though I’m not a journalist, the feeling, the anxiety, the stress, the unfairness, the feeling that you don’t trust anyone...’ 

“I chose to tell the story through a black-and-white lens and now the feeling the film expresses is so vivid, so strong, audiences are glued to the screen... I feel that the film has become an event, people are having such strong reactions.