Those who remember the recent Là-bas (2006) by Chantal Akerman will be tempted to see a certain kinship emerge between the two films. But Anat Even’s Closure is not about closing up, or even deliberate withdrawal as its title could suggest. The familiar environment that the filmmaker films from her window captures the changing measures following her brother’s death is a stand on history. While huge modern buildings spring up around the bridge in ruin built by the Ottomans, tourist guides evoke the glorious past of the first Jewish neighborhood built on the outskirts of Jaffa. Between ruins and concrete, from bereavement to the making of a film once again the story’s strength (and film form – Udi was both a sculptor and potter) is the essential but fragile storytelling of what both constitutes it and haunts it, that is to say by retaining the visible signs of the passage of people and things dissolved in extensive changes and that over an entire region.
Jérôme Baron
