Testing family ties
ISRAELI documentary filmmaker Nitzan Gilady is intensely proud of his family, especially his 70-year-old, Yemini-born father, Shmuel.
In 2009, Shmuel suggested to his wife Rachel that the whole family – three sons Nitzan, Yizhar and Yariv – spend a week in a rented campervan travelling across the Arizona desert to the Grand Canyon.
From this testing time in America in a cramped campervan has come Gilady’s rewarding documentary Family Time (Zeman Mishpacha) and a healing in the Gilady family that the filmmaker never believed possible.
“My first reaction to my father’s suggestion was, ‘No, I’m not coming – I’m going to be busy,’” Gilady tells me by phone from Auckland, where he introduced Family Time at New Zealand’s Documentary Edge Festival.
His father – who is a dominant, talkative man – insisted that it would be a great opportunity, since they were not getting any younger.
But Gilady’s response to his proposal was instinctive.
“What I wanted to say to him was, ‘What am I going to do, stuck with everyone in a van for seven days and six nights? Talk, but not really talk – pretending? A big part of me and my brothers is not accepted by you,’” he says.
“However, what I did say to him was, ‘Okay, I’ll come, but I’m bringing a camera. I’ll be filming.’
“And he replied, ‘Are you serious? Are you sure?’
“From my father’s point of view, the result would be a movie which showed how great things are, the laughter, what we were going to see at the beautiful Grand Canyon. He never thought that the film would show all the heavy baggage that we carry as a family.”
Gilady is gay, something that his loving but deeply conservative father could never admit to himself or others.
“When he said ‘yes’ to the camera, it was like bringing a shield with me on the trip,” says Gilady.
“I didn’t know if I could make a film out of it all, but this was an easier way to approach them, through the camera. I wish I didn’t need all of that. I wanted to solve something for all of us, to put an end to the hiding, and for us to come out as a family.”
At the age of 40, Gilady’s homosexuality was not the only secret in the family. The youngest of the Gilady brothers, Yariv, suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder following military service in the Security Zone in South Lebanon in 1991.
What Gilady ached for was his family to come to terms with realities that were being treated as secrets.
“No-one knew about Yariv’s inability to cope fully with life because of his post-traumatic stress disorder,” he says.
“Outside the family it was treated as gossip. Within it, we never discussed it or tried to come to terms with it.
“Israel is very supportive of people who need help because of post-traumatic stress disorder, but it has to be proved, and this is very difficult for people who suffer from it. It involves many meetings and examinations, lawyers. My father had to fight for Yariv.
“I hope that people see this about my father. He is the lion that protected us. He looks harsh in the film, a very strict and strong man. But he did everything for us, and what he went through for Yariv was unbelievable.”
During Gilady’s own military service he was stationed in Gaza, but reassigned later as a photographer. Brought up in a protected environment in a small town far from Tel Aviv, he hankered for life further afield, and later travelled to New York where he graduated from the Circle in the Square Theatre School.
Gilady will be in Melbourne for the premiere screening of Family Time as part of a year-round program connected to the annual Jewish International Film Festival held in November.
As a filmmaker since 1999, Nitzan has written and directed six cutting-edge documentaries. These include the much-lauded In Satmar Custody (2003) about the tragedy befalling a Yemini-Jewish family who were brought to New York by followers of an anti-Zionist Chassidic dynasty, and Jerusalem Is Proud To Present (2008), which records events surrounding Jerusalem’s first Gay Pride Parade in 2006.
Gilady says that he knew from an early age that his own life was going to be different from the others, and the first person to pick this up and accept his difference was a cosmopolitan aunt on his mother’s side who was visiting from London.
“I was about six or seven at the time, and at my grandparents’ house looking at an article in a magazine about a gay man. My aunt, who I always felt close to in personality, looked at the article and said to me: ‘You know in London, men kiss each other and men can walk together holding hands.’”
This was Gilady’s first realisation that being gay was to become his path in life. Not so his parents, who, despite all the clues, refused to put two and two together. A malicious tip-off forced them to confront Gilady about his sexuality in 2004. But if he was now out of the closet, his parents were in it, with both refusing to speak about it again.
When asked about his parents’ reaction to the film made about their trip to the Grand Canyon, Gilady becomes transported.
“Oh my God – it’s unbelievable! After I shot it, I put all the tapes in the back of the closet, literally. Then after a year I began to edit them, at the same time going to a shrink to get therapy about what would happen when I showed it to them.”
Gilady took a cut of the film to his parents’ house and was prepared for hysterics or something melodramatic.
“We watched it in the smallest room of the house, on a small computer screen. This way I hoped they wouldn’t see all the details! But from the first moment Dad is laughing and it was such a relief,” he recalls.
“They laughed so much they weren’t listening to what was being said, to the point that their eyes were moist and I saw they were crying.
“When I said: ‘Dad, are you alright?’ my father replied: ‘No, no, I have an allergy!’ “They were so moved. There was no criticism – they just hugged me. It was very moving. Later I went to my shrink and told him that I spent a year-and-a-half preparing for this, and they simply hugged and accepted me.”
True to his nature as the “lion” of his family, Shmuel has put the closet behind him and become a fierce defender of gay rights.
A month before the premiere of Family Time in Jerusalem last year, he wrote a letter to Israeli President Shimon Peres, protesting the disparagement of the gay community by one of the nation’s leaders, saying: “This isn’t the way gay people should be treated.”
Gilady observes in wonder and affection: “It’s amazing how far he’s travelled since we made the film.”
REPORT by Jan Epstein
PHOTO of the Gilady family during the campervan trip in the Arizona desert.
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