The Victoria International Jewish Film Festival (VIJFF) will launch its fourth season with a special pre-festival screening of the new film Ben-Gurion: Epilogue on Sunday, June 3rd, from 7:30-9:00 pm, at the Vic Theatre.
The 70-minute documentary is based on recently discovered archival interviews with Israel’s founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. Five years after he retired from decades of political life to live on a small kibbutz in southern Israel, Ben-Gurion reflects on a variety of topics, both personal and political, in all of his brilliant and worldly complexity.
Sitting for these remarkable and long-lost interviews in 1968, Ben-Gurion reflects strikingly, in English, on his years in power. He reveals his pride, but also his qualms, about Israel’s path as a nation since its establishment in 1948. The film offers neither judgment nor celebration, but allows Ben-Gurion to reflect on topics ranging from his arrival in Palestine and desire to reinvent Jewish life, to his very modern understanding of the Bible, and his pragmatic but sometimes deeply unpopular political decisions.
“To see the documentary Ben-Gurion: Epilogue is to understand with greater insight the dilemmas and struggles of the early Jewish leaders of the young state of Israel,” said Lincoln Z. Shlensky, the VIJFF’s director. “As violence continues to permeate Israel’s relationship with the Palestinians and its neighbours, and as Israeli society increasingly is riven with social and religious conflicts, Ben-Gurion’s interviews in 1968 offer the remarkable portrait of a self-reflective leader unafraid to discuss his own sense of resolve alongside his doubts.”
The June 3rd screening is a special event that will serve as a pre-launch for the fourth Victoria International Jewish Film Festival, which will take place November 3-6, 2018, at the Vic Theatre, 808 Douglas St., in Victoria.
JCC Victoria 