Oy vey, is this funny?

Yoav Shamir's Defamation takes on anti-Semitism in surprising ways. Photo / Supplied by Joanna Kelly

Can an Israeli Jew be an anti-Semite? Just ask Yoav Shamir. The 39-year-old Tel Aviv native found himself described in precisely those terms after the release of his striking 2003 documentary Checkpoint.

That film observed, without overt editorialising, events at some of the 200 roadblocks in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as Israeli soldiers, many of them deeply conflicted, stop, search and interrogate Palestinians as they went about their lives.

Response to the film indirectly spawned Defamation, his provocative movie, which features in the Documentary Edge Film Festival opening in Auckland today. Checkpoint did well in Israel, Shamir says.

"It sparked a lot of discussion - some people liked it and some people hated it but it was healthy discussion and the Israeli army even showed the film to soldiers. But from the American press and especially the Jewish American press I came under attack - I was called the Israeli Mel Gibson and even anti-Semitic."

The use of such a loaded word got Shamir thinking. He began to notice how prominently and regularly the word "anti-Semitism" features in Israeli newspaper headlines. He reflected that, although he had travelled widely, he had never experienced it. And he embarked on an international quest to explore the nature of anti-Semitism in the modern world.

The result, which Michael (Fahrenheit 9/11) Moore has described as "bold and brave", is nothing if not stimulating. Shamir follows Abe Foxman, the imposing head of the New York-based Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which monitors and campaigns against anti-Semitism and he interviews Norman Finkelstein, a controversial Jewish academic who accuses those who perceive anti-Semitism of "pathological narcissism".

Neither man emerges from the film unscathed: Foxman comes across as a faintly sinister bully and Finkelstein as a man whose passion for his point of view verges on the unhinged. But Shamir also talks to an orthodox rabbi who argues that anti-Zionism does not equal anti-Semitism and that many secular Jews draw their identity from remembering the Holocaust and discerning anti-Semitism.

The film scarcely breaks new ground: such critiques, many by Jewish writers and scholars have become almost commonplace in recent decades. As far back as the 1970s Abba Eban, the Israeli foreign minister, famously quipped that "there's no business like Shoah business". But Shamir makes the discussion approachable with a jauntiness that seems to belie the seriousness of the subject.

The style, which uses on-screen graphics and an occasionally irreverent but never flippant tone, was a response to the fact that he was entering a crowded territory. "When you make a film about anti-Semitism, the first thing that comes to mind is black and white archives, testimonies," he says. "But I thought there were more sides of it that needed to be explored, and I realise I had to break the cycle of the form. I almost deliberately tried to make something that was 180 degrees different. When I was planning to make this film, everybody I discussed it with said 'You'll never be able to do it', because the subject matter is so sensitive. I decided the way to tackle it was to take a very personal approach and use humour to keep people interested while also asking them to think about what the film is saying."

Predictably, perhaps, the ADL took a dim view of the film, describing it in a statement on its website as "a perverse, personal, political perspective" which "[distorted] the prevalence and impact of anti-Semitism." It's a view which is, at the very least, contestable.

Other ADL spokespeople interviewed ("Everyone knows the Jews are hated," says one) could come up with no incident for Shamir to follow up except workers who had been denied time off for religious holidays, an experience presumably not unique to Jews.

But the film's most disturbing sequences focus on trips by Israeli schoolkids to Auschwitz and Dachau. Shamir says about 500 students a year went on such trips when he was at school; now it's more like 30,000. They are accompanied by security guards and discouraged from talking to the locals, ostensibly for their own protection from anti-Semitic tirades. The film shows an encounter through an impenetrable language barrier between a trio of teenagers and two elderly Poles, which the kids later, quite erroneously, reported as having been an anti-Semitic tirade. On another occasion, Shamir says, students assumed that no waiter came to their table at a restaurant because they were Jews. But there were no waiters; it was a self-service caf.

It is here that the film's primary idea - that the experience of anti-Semitism, indeed bigotry and prejudice of any sort, can be partly created by being anticipated - coheres most strongly. Shamir is ready for the criticism that he denies the existence of anti-Semitism (which, for the record, he does not) but he says he just believes in sparking discussion, as he did with Checkpoint.

"I didn't come to Checkpoint with a strong political stance. I was just trying to be fair. My parents and friends who live around Tel Aviv, they didn't know what was happening only 20 minutes from where they live. I thought people should be aware of this and know about it.

"I always believe in healthy self-criticism."

LOWDOWN

What: Documentary Edge Film Festival, with more than 50 films from 25 countries.

Highlights: Sergio, a powerful portrait of Sergio Vieira de Mello, who presided over the creation of an independent East Timor and died in a bomb blast in Iraq; The Yes Men Fix The World, about the exploits of anti-corporate activists Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno; the festival presents world premieres of eight NZ docos; and a four-film Focus on China looks at life in the rising super-power.

Where & when: Rialto, Newmarket, from today until March 4.

More info: documentaryedge.org.nz