Tomer Heymann is a contemporary
Israeli documentary filmmaker. His film It Kinda Scares Me
won first prize at the 2001 Haifa Film Festival, and 2006's Paper
Dolls won first place at the Berlinale and was presented in
competition at SILVERDOCS 2006. His 2003 film Fucked Up
Generation was released theatrically in Israel.
Tomer spoke with Mark Adnum via email in July 2007.
MARK ADNUM: Paper
Dolls is respectful to the girls of the title, but
I can't help but think that if the Paper Dolls weren't so obviously out
of place and, well, freakish, a lot of the film's impact would be lost.
As a documentarian, how do you balance what must be an acknowledgment
of your subjects' glaring eccentricities and a need to catch their
mundane humanity?
TOMER HEYMANN: I believe that one of the things that turn a regular
person into a documentary protagonist is the complexity you mentioned;
on one hand the daily routine, almost boring monotony that the
character brings, in the case of the Paper Dolls it's the banal work of
cleaning and nursing the old men, and on the other hand the importance
of breaking that routine and expressing other more unusual and
eccentric aspects of oneself – like this group of five men who dress up
with paper and feel the most festive and unique in the world. I try to
bring in my films both these sides in a way that they don't cancel each
other out, but in a way that the viewer knows and understands the tough
daily routine of the Paper Dolls and enables to grasp the grandeur and
glamour of this drag queen group. If we were not familiar with their
everyday job, this phenomenon wouldn't be so extraordinary, as there
were many films made on drag queens.
What struck me was how the elderly Jewish men in the
care of the Paper Dolls seemed queerer than the Dolls themselves. Your
film didn't really delve in to how such apparently conservative people
responded so casually to such an unlikely situation - were you not
particularly interested in this angle?
Practically the orthodox men were after a stroke that disabled them to
fully communicate verbally. In that sense, I believe we learned
something much more profound from their mimic and physical response to
the Paper Dolls who took care of them. The pleasured expression on the
old man's face when Nits gives him a head massage, communicates a much
stronger emotional bond than an interview would have. Other than that,
we're talking about a closed and conservative society of orthodox Jews
who object any external media; they don't have TVs and read only
ultra-orthodox newspapers, so I'm doubtful that they would have
cooperated with me, a non-religious director.
Your films look at very flamboyant characters yet a
little bit of yourself appears in each of them. I remember in Paper
Dolls where you spoke briefly about being happily single -
adventurously alone. How much of a documentarian's films are about
themselves, rather than their subjects?
I can indicate about my self that
a part of choosing to direct documentaries is also because it's
apparently a kind of therapy for me. It's a process that I begin and
don't know how or where it's going to end, but what is clear to me is
that not only my characters will over go change, but me too. I choose
my characters out of curiosity towards them, some kind of feeling that
I develop towards them, which is dynamic and can change throughout the
film, like with the Paper Dolls my relation to them originated from a
certain rejection and even repulse and ended after a long emotional
journey in true and exceptional love. There is no doubt that parts of
me are represented in my characters in a way and since it's a
documentary film, the relationship between the director and the
characters create in a sense another character, so boundaries begin to
blur and it's hard to distinguish which parts are mine and which are
the characters'. I try to be aware of this complex dynamics and enable
the viewer to accept the characters and me from the most clean and
sincere place that gives the most realistic and direct experience.
Further to that, you are quite handsome
and reasonably successful and talented. Do you date a lot? Are you just
not the coupling type?
First, thank you for the
compliments! As for coupling, I'm in a significant relationship over a
year with a charming guy I met at one of the festivals abroad; it's a
beautiful love that crosses oceans. Intimacy is important to me but
also the need of independence and freedom and when all that comes
together with my occupation that requires a lot of trips and devotion
to new characters who take me to unknown journeys, not rarely they
conflict. I'm still learning how to deal with that and find the
delicate balance of being in a good relationship without totally giving
up my needs.
Are you interested in
telling non-Israeli, or non-Israel based stories?
As a documentary filmmaker
naturally I find the stories in my close environment, in this case
Israel. I am curious about exciting and important stories outside my
country and I even had an interesting experience out of Israel, which
is not sure to work out yet. The language is a central and significant
matter when it comes to documentary work and sometimes can be a bit
limiting but from my experience, when there is an emotional connection,
the language and mentality differences really help the interest of the
foreign director and enable him to ask the most seemingly trivial
questions, where often the essence of things lies.
How did you respond to
Spielberg's Munich?
I'm sorry to say I haven't watched Munich yet but
I'm definitely happy and aware of the wave of films dealing with
Israeli-Jewish subjects like the one about to come out: Adam
Resurrected. It's interesting to see the different angle of
the stories we all grew up on, the foreign eye has the cleanness that
lights a familiar story in another light that often surprises me and
teaches me more about how Israelis-Jews are experienced from the outside
Eytan Fox and Gal Uchovsky are good friends of mine who I love and
appreciate their work very much. Yossi and Jagger
is a film that made it in Israel and the world and expressed a
different aspect of the military experience which is dealt with a lot
in Israeli fiction and documentary films. The ability to articulate a
homosexual world within a rigid and uniform militant world puts the
sexual choice in an almost trivial, for granted place, and the
perceptive and tender way in which Fox and Uchovsky presented it to the
viewer enabled to accept this paradoxical combination wrapped with
beauty and sensitivity.
