Earlier today Jordan Ruimy posted about a special Venice Film Festival screening of a “yet to be announced” film that will apparently screen on Thursday, 9.10. A source has told Ruimy that the title was held back from the original Venice slate announcement due to “security reasons”.
Word around the campfire is that the film might be Michel Franco‘s Circles, reportedly a 90-minute, Hebrew-language, black-and-white drama about the early stirrings of the state of Israel (i.e., early to mid ’50s) and particularly the exploits of IDF commando Meir Har Zion and his sister Shoshana.
Meir Har-Zion went on to become “a legendary and controversial figure…in the eyes of many, the greatest IDF fighter but to others, a man whose problematic moral outlook raised troubling questions.”
Paul Newman‘s Ari Ben-Canaan, the leading Israeli character in Otto Preminger‘s Exodus (’60), is generally believed to have been based on Har-Zion.
Circles, reportedly shot within a 1.66:1 aspect ratio, is Franco’s tenth feature film.
Moshe Dayan once described Har Zion as “the finest of our commando soldiers, the best soldier ever to emerge in the IDF…the elite of the elite.” His three-year military career (1954–56) was cut short by battle injuries, but he re-upped during the 1967 and 1973 wars.
AI sez: “In December 1954, Shoshana and a companion named Oded Wegmeister hiked into the Judean Desert (then Jordanian territory) and were ambushed and murdered by Bedouin members of the Arab al-Rashayda tribe. Distraught by her death, Meir Har-Zion and a small group of Unit 101 comrades crossed into Jordan in March 1955 to carry out an unsanctioned reprisal killing.”