Educational Media Reviews Online

Three plots are intertwined in this pseudo-documentary narrated by Israeli film-maker Avi Mograbi:

• 1- an autobiographical tale of a piece of property Mograbi purchased whose boundary is accidentally drawn over his neighbor's land, enabling Mograbi, unwittingly, to start building an enormous house that he sells to a Shylockian Jew;
• 2- a backstage view of celebrations marking Israel's 50th anniversary as a nation that Mograbi first agrees to document;
• 3- a second assignment Mograbi accepts to document Palestinian plans to mark 50 years of the Nakba (Catastrophe) that Jewish Israel represents to them.

The threads come together when the jubilee celebrations occur on Mograbi's birthday, the day he contracts to turn over a completed house to its buyer. In due course, Mograbi discovers the error in his boundary and tries to correct it, and is vilified in turn by the purchaser, the builder, and the neighbor whose land he wants to return. He vacillates between wanting to do the right thing and being forced to do what the Israeli system demands. At last, he listens as the buyer threatens to ruin him and wishes him "happy birthday."

The camerawork is deliberately rough as if the viewer were seeing uncut documentary footage, full of badly aimed shots and shaky panning such as an amateur who can't handle a camera might take. The result is exaggerated and deliberately crude. The naive style doesn't ring true-especially since Mograbi is supposed to be a skilled professional.

The piece appears to be undisguised anti-Israeli propaganda. It is aimed at Americans lacking much knowledge of Israeli and Palestinian history, or of current events, who are ready to be persuaded that the Jews are fundamentally evil, thriving on land stolen from their innocent, long-suffering Arab neighbors. Objective observers who have followed Israel's history-from the United Nations partition instantly rejected by the Palestinians and followed by multiple wars to push the Jews into the sea, to the present, in which efforts at peace are periodically punctuated by terrorism waged as holy war-should be offended at the portrayal of Jews as uniformly greedy and degenerate, eager to exploit and demean Arabs. The piece contains tastes of every stereotypical slur ever hurled at Jews.

All the Jews-even Mograbi-appear slovenly, grasping, loud, and arrogant, while all the Palestinians appear neat, kindly, quiet, and self-effacing. The celebrations sponsored by the Israelis are tawdry and ugly, driven by media hype, sexual innuendo, and surface glitz. In contrast, Palestinians plan dignified presentations and document the wrongs committed by their Israeli persecutors. Amazingly, because it defies experience, most Jews speak only Hebrew, which is subtitled, while the Arabs speak perfect English. Former Israeli prime minister Netanyahu, then in office, is shown spouting lies, leering at women, and behaving like a caricature. Shots of him were taken from news footage, but seemed to be edited and spliced to create the effect Mograbi aims to show.

The only collections likely to want Happy Birthday, Mr. Mograbi are those seeking examples of propaganda. It can sit comfortably with anti-Semitic stuff from the Third Reich. Institutions wanting descriptions-critical as well as laudatory-of Israeli life and politics, Palestinian aspirations, or the Israeli Jubilee, would do better with PBS offerings on Israel, Jordan, and the Middle East, or first-rate slice-of-life films from Israeli cinema. Rating: Not recommended