The early settlers who created the first kibbutzim dreamed of more than just a Jewish homeland. They were creating a new egalitarian society free of exploitation by holding their property in common, idealizing collective labor, and even raising their children as a single collective family who lived together in the Children’s House.
Children of the Sun is a 2007 Israeli documentary about the first generation of children born to the kibbutzniks that moved to Palestine in the decades before World War II and the founding of the state of Israel. Made up of archival footage, this story of that first generation of children is told in anonymous voice-over commentary by some of the children in those pictures, now grown old, with just a few simple slides to introduce the subject and to separate the parts of the film into chapters. Ran Tal, the writer-director of Children of the Sun, seems to want to suggest that the film is a pure historical document, laid before the audience for them to draw their own conclusions.
But every story has a point of view, every storyteller adds his own perspective to the tales he tells. That is no less so for documentary filmmakers than for the screenwriters and directors of comedies, dramas or horror films. It is true of Tal as well. The shots chosen from years’-worth of footage shift back and forth between black-and-white and color, crossing decades, and the disembodied voices responding to unheard questions all reflect a deliberate message he wants the viewer to take away.
What Tal has left out is any sense of context that would help in understanding the grand social experiment that the early kibbutz movement was attempting. The Socialist-Zionists that formed the second wave of immigrants making aliyah did not exist in a vacuum. The dream of re-forming the world into an Earthly utopia and creating a New Man by collective effort was common at the time, whether the governing ideology was Labor Zionism, Communism, Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker movement or B.F. Skinner’s aggressively behaviorist psychology. Its antecedents date back to social movements from the Paris Commune to the Owenite commune of New Harmony, Indiana.
Nor does he include the fact that the “failed social experiment,” while never more than 7 percent of the Israeli population, produced a disproportionate share of its military leaders, intellectuals, and politicians, as well as large numbers of doctors, lawyers and teachers and a full three-quarters of Israeli Air Force pilots.
Seattle Jewish Film Festival: Collective memory
