From a Distance: Orna Ben-Dor's Holocaust Quintet

Abstract

ABSTRACT:Orna Ben-Dor (1954- ) is one Israel's most prominent filmmakers and television directors. By the 2000s Ben-Dor had directed four films with Holocaust survivors as her main protagonists. The article analyzes the central themes in Ben-Dor's Holocaust-related films and explains how the director maintains a perspective of distance. Because she so often relates in film interviews to her parents' Holocaust and her sensitivity as a second-generation Holocaust survivor, one might have expected her to engage with the topic in her autobiographical documentary, released in 2009. However, as this article will show, Ben-Dor downplays the Holocaust in this film and turns the camera inward to focus on gender rather than on the hallmark themes of her previous films: PTSD of Holocaust survivors, the transgenerational transfer of trauma to the second generation and the absorption of Holocaust survivors in Israel. As a director who has played such an important part in Israel's Holocaust commemoration, Ben-Dor remains strangely reticent about her own personal Holocaust-related story.