Hanna K.

Infobox Film
name = Hanna K.


image_size =
caption =
director = Costa-Gavras
producer = Bob Cortez
Edward Lewis
writer = Costa-Gavras
Franco Solinas
narrator =
starring = Jill Clayburgh
Jean Yanne
Gabriel Byrne Mohammad Bakri
music = Gabriel Yared
cinematography = Ricardo Aronovich
editing = Françoise Bonnot
distributor = Universal Pictures
released = September 7 1983
runtime = 111 mins
country = flagicon|Israel Israel
flagicon|France France
language = English
budget =
preceded_by =
followed_by =
website =
amg_id = 1:94264
imdb_id = 0085642

"Hannah K." is a 1983 drama film directed by Costa Gavras, starring Jill Clayburgh and Gabriel Byrne.

The story

"Hanna K." is the story of Hannah Kaufman, a child of Holocaust survivors and an American-Jewish immigrant to Israel, who was a court-appointed lawyer assigned to defend a Palestinian, Salim Bakri, accused of terrorism and infiltration. Salim claimed that he was trying to regain possession of his family house. Hanna saved him from a jail sentence, but he was deported to Jordan. Salim eventually returned, was jailed for illegal immigration, and he again asked for her services. Hanna investigated the story and discovered that Salim’s family home was now a tourist attraction in Kafr Rimon, a settlement built and lived in by Russian Jews. Bakri’s former village of Kufr Rumaneh had disappeared except for a few stones and trees.

The state’s attorneys offered Hanna a deal: if she dropped the proceedings, they would arrange for Salim to become a South African citizen, and he could then return to Israel and try to get his property back. Hanna was confronted with the fact that one legacy of the Holocaust was the disposition of the Palestinians while her colleagues attempted to persuade her of the merits of the arrangement for Salim with the argument that Israel must be “defended” even if Palestinians are denied their rights [Edward Said’s review of "Hanna K.", T"he Village Voice", Oct.11, 1983, p45] . The film contained a number of aesthetic problems and Hanna’s personal life at times overshadowed and muddled the political aspects of the story. Nevertheless, as Edward Said, Parr Professor of English Literature at Columbia University, commented: “As a political as well as cinematic intervention, then Hanna K. is a statement of a great and I believe, lasting significance.”

The controversy

Cheryl A. Rubenberg states in 1986, “The entertainment industry has traditionally contributed to the general American sympathy for Israel through popular films and television docudramas such as "Exodus", "The Chosen", "Golda", and "Entebbe", among others. No film was ever made reflecting the Palestinian perspective until Costa Gavras’s "Hannah K." in 1983. [Cheryl A. Rubenberg. “Israel and the American National Interest, A Critical Examination”. University of Illinois Press, 1986. ISBN 0252013301. p 340] Rubenberg notes that Costa Gavras attempted to depict the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in human terms, and unlike previous Gavras films, Hanna K. did not turn on emotions and attempted to present the complexity of a multifaceted situation without Gavras’s usual heavy hand.

Pro-Israeli groups were extremely concerned about Hanna K. and its potential for depicting the Palestinian issue in a sympathetic light. An internal memorandum was circulated by a B’nai B’rith and advising members that if the film played in their cities there were certain comments that could be made in the local press. Attached to the memorandum were two sets of prepared criticisms, written by Shimon Samuels and Abba Cohen from the French headquarters of the B’nai B’rith, outlining the arguments supporters of Israel should make against the film [ Cheryl A. Rubenberg, p341] .

Hanna K. opened in several American cities and played for a short time to virtually universal negative reviews, (where it was reviewed at all), then was abruptly pulled from circulation by the American distributor of the film. One Chicago distributor commented off-the-record that while it could not be proven that the film was pulled because of political pressure, distributors “understood” that the film was unacceptable to supporters of Israel, who have many friends and are themselves important in the entertainment industry. The director’s wife commented: “in the United States, a Universal tour that was to have encompassed New York, Boston, Washington, Chicago, and San Francisco was dropped at the last moment and a two-week run in New York substituted. Costa Gavras gave scores of interviews to journalists and critics and began to notice a common thread. ‘They would come in and say that while they didn’t have political objections, a friend or relative had seen the film and thought it was anti-Israeli. After a while, we took side bets as to whether the writer in. We were about to see would have a cousin, Sr., neighbor etc., who’d spotted an anti-Israeli angle!’” Costa Gavras personally advertised the film in the New York Times at a cost of $50,000 after Universal refused to. Universal even forbade the director the use of advertisements that had been prepared for the film. [ Hanna Assadi’s interview with Michelle Ray-Gavras and lengthy article in "Al Fajr", Feb. 8, 1984. ]

Reviews

The movie was reviewed by Vincent Canby for the New York Times. [ [http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?_r=1&res=9D03E2D71F38F933A0575AC0A965948260&oref=slogin ] ]

References

External links

*imdb title|0085642