sempozyum_bildiri_kitabi

telephonic negotiations between mother and daughter also resonate with the workings of the lens
found against Yaelle’s face. Carefully capturing Yaelle’s facial expressions to deliver the very minute
details of the live drama, the camera often cuts and fragments Yaelle’s head from various angles,
thus composing incomplete and discrepant portraits that constitute her presumable real self. The
performances of truthful revelations in the film underlie and demonstrate the denouncing avoidance
of a father, whose hurtful silences are transmitted by several deafened channels, marking a
persistent present absence in a daughter’s life.
Entanglements of dispersed utterances with dense wailings in French, Yaelle’s expressive bursts
punctuate the flow of the film: emanating from Yaelle’s dis/connections to an elsewhere, they
interrupt the dialogues and duets spoken and sang in the home of the Hebrew. Accordingly, while
the geographic and cultural landscape of Israel comprise the setting of the film, France seldom
flickers on the screen as a destination for visits from which one always inevitably returns home. The
film thus reiterates the Zionist premise asserting that Jewish homeland is one, rendering Yaelle’s
home of origin an abandoned diasporic location mostly left outside of the frame. Against this
backdrop, the ethnic, religious, and cultural heritage that Yaelle arrives from remains utterly
recondite the entire time. Yaelle’s miscommunication with her home thus epitomizes the enigmatic
inexplicability of her place of birth: as her father stops talking to her, any knowledge about Yaelle’s
roots is rendered unattainable. The more Yaelle comes out, the less we learn about her possible preimmigration
identifications.
Wonderings between two places shape the story between the two women. It is these wonderings
and ponderings that the films generate that finally motivated us to rewind Please Love and reenact
Yaelle’s ways: just like her screened figure at the theater show, we turned to look up Wikipedia.
Under “Jews in France”, we read: “Today, French Jews are mostly Sephardi and Mizrahi who came
from North Africa and the Mediterranean region.” 11 Indeed, as her surname may indicate, 12 and just
like us writers, Yaelle is a Sephardi Jew who, upon immigrating to Israel, was labeled “a Mizrahi”: a
term commonly ascribed to non‐Ashkenazi Jews from Asia and Africa, mainly from Arab and Islamic
countries. 13 Ella Shohat demonstrated how the Eurocentric Zionist discourse constructed the
Mizrahim as “extremely conservative, even reactionary, and religiously fanatic, in contrast to the
liberal, secular, and educated European Jews;” this orientalist view fueled state institutions’
reparative strategies to assimilate the Oriental Jews into the ways of “a civilized, modern society.” 14
In recent years, the global orientalist perspective has expanded to incorporate homophobic behavior
as an additional innate flaw and fault characterizing the subject of the Orient. As Jasbir Puar showed,
Euro‐American discourses portray the oriental as “simultaneously pathologically excessive yet
repressive, perverse yet homophobic;” 15 promoting homo‐normativity primarily by permitting samesex
couples to marry. And yet “benevolence toward sexual others” is often “contingent upon evernarrowing
parameters of white racial privilege.” 16
On that note, and in parentheses, it is interesting to think of the use of the sound in the films,
which is a key cinematic tool use by the filmmakers. In this context, the lack of information about one
of Aya's songs in the films is thus curious, and may be telling of the films overall explicit political
statement. In their artistic activity, both Aya and Yaelle are trying to deal with the politics of LGBT
rights. "Between the Sacred and the Profane" is a song written by Aya after the killing of two LGBT
youth in Tel‐Aviv in the summer of 2009. 17 It is worth thinking of the reason of putting the story
behind the song, that is sang in the soundtrack, without its original story. One may think that the
filmmakers would share their thoughts and the influence of the community tragic upon them. When
the requested explanation is missing in the cinematic text ‐ the story behind the song, that is
dedicated to the memory of the youth murdered in this massacred appears in every place the song is
available, from their website to YouTube – but is absent from the films. We are left with the feeling
that the filmmakers desired to omit any incriminating facts that would paint the pretty picture of