A mount with no Temple

“From here Jesus ascended to Heaven, the Divine Spirit left Jerusalem after the Temple was destroyed, and here the Day of Redemption and the resurrection of the dead will take place”: Michal Bentovim, director of Nobody Home, explains why she chose the Mount of Olives as the main character of her documentary film

Ruti Zuaretz

Nobody Home, Michal Bentovim’s documentary film, is an impressionistic portrait of the Mount of Olives – considered a sacred place connecting the events of the past with future prophecies – and of the people who choose to sanctify it in the present, as part of their search for meaning, faith and a calling.

This is Michal Bentovim’s first film, and though she is strictly non-religious, she states: “I’m obsessed with Jerusalem. I grew up there and always had an ambivalent attitude towards the city. A love-hate relationship.”

Is there anything new left to say about Jerusalem?

“I wanted to approach the ‘Jerusalem issue’ from a different angle. Not from the political, current-affairs, Israeli-Palestinian angle, but through a religious-spiritual point of view. The establishment of myths, the spiritual connection to the land, to locate a point where earthly Jerusalem meets heavenly Jerusalem.”

Why did you choose the Mount of Olives of all places?

“Mount of Olives is a kind of gate connecting life in this world to life in the afterworld. From here Jesus ascended to Heaven, the Divine Spirit left Jerusalem after the Temple was destroyed, and here the Day of Redemption and the resurrection of the dead will take place. That’s why all religions bury their dead here. The Mount of Olives is like the backyard of Jerusalem. A boundary between life and death. That’s also true geographically. It’s stuck between verdure and the desert. When you stand at the top of the Mount looking east, you see the entire Judean Desert in all its barrenness. And in the west – bustling life, greenery, urban development.”

How did you make contact with the characters?

“I tried to approach them without prejudice, without judgment and criticism. A bit like a tourist coming to Jerusalem in pilgrimage, who touches the holy and ignores and overlooks the complex reality. The religious tourist who comes to Jerusalem comes to reach for the heavens, not to engage in the earthly politics of it. He scratches the surface and only takes from the city what he was looking for in the first place. The people I met on the Mount of Olives had this authentic naivety about it. They all manifested innocence and unadulterated love for the Mount’s sanctity. That’s where I got my point of view.

The film does not take a stand. Why?

“Yes, I heard that throughout the making of the film, but it was very important for me to offer a more objective outlook. Taking a stand by not taking a stand. Some would call it restraint, but in this day and age, a time so filled with hate and violence, when everything is so polarized, when you have to pick a camp to belong to and everything is political, it was important to me to create a film without good guys and bad guys. Even the miserable meeting between the Jewish settler Amital and Ibrahim the Palestinian is mostly just an awkward moment, emphasizing how the politics that penetrates destroys the Mount’s spiritual importance. Since it was first mentioned in the history books, Jerusalem has been a conflicted place. Everyone wants it, but it doesn’t really belong to anyone. Like Aviya the Jewish settler says: ‘Jerusalem is not ours, it’s God’s’. But the different beliefs make the believer feel he is a part of God, and therefore has possession over a place that actually doesn’t belong to him. Look at the viewpoint of messianic Judaism, a viewpoint embraced by the religious Zionists. God for them is out here. In the land. In the place itself. That’s why they feel that they have possession over it.

Why did you choose the sensitive name Nobody Home?

“While working on the film, I realized that a physical grasp on the location fuels this longing for something that isn’t yours, or that you believe was yours in the past. This is why the Tisha B’Av fast is represented so prominently in the film. My assumption is that the obsessive Jewish connection – if you put aside the resurrection suggested by Zionism – is in the absence. The absence of a home. The absence of the Temple. Even I, the ninth-generation in my family to be born in Jerusalem, can tell you that I always felt like a tourist here. That it’s not really mine, and it isn’t my home.”