Cinema
The Wooden Gun
רובה חוליות
Ilan Moshenson · 1979
Synopsis
Tel Aviv, May 1950. Yoni Schreiber, twelve, commands a gang of children at war with Adi's gang. Caught alone one day, in defiance of the rules, he gets his arm broken and says he fell. His mother, who arrived before the war and whose family stayed in Poland, watches for the immigrant ships and listens in the evening to the missing-persons notices on the radio. A survivor said to be mad, known as Palestina, prowls the neighbourhood; the children stone her shack. For the decisive battle, Yoni's gang makes wooden rubber-band guns that fire bed springs.
Context
The title refers to the children's weapon: a plank cut into the shape of a rifle, a thick rubber band held by a trigger, and, as projectiles, the metal links of the bedsprings issued to immigrants. The screenplay received a grant from the Ministry of Industry and the Shaike Ophir Prize; Eitan Even and two Americans, Richard Sanders and John Hardy, fellow students of Moshenson in London, produced the film. The cinematography is by Gadi Danzig, the music by Yossi Mar-Haim; Ophelia Shtruhl plays Palestina. It was shown in Berlin, in the youth film section, and at Locarno in 1979.
Who it is for
An hour and a half, in Hebrew. It helps to know that survivors from Europe were then arriving in large numbers in a country where little was said about what they had been through.
Prizes and reception
One of the first Israeli films to deal with the Shoah, according to the Jerusalem Cinematheque; shown in Berlin and Locarno.