To See If I’m Smiling (2007)

Directed by: Tamar Yarom | 59 minutes | documentary

The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Who didn’t grow up with it? As with the documentary ‘Faces’ by Gmax, we are dealing with a different approach to the conflict than we normally see. In any case, a recurring question while watching ‘To See If I’m Smiling’: what is normal?

In her documentary, Tamar Yarom interviews a number of female soldiers who talk about their service in the Israeli army. The film begins and ends with Meytal, a young Israeli woman who looks back on her time in the military through photos from a photo album. She and the five other girls (Rotem, Inbar, Dana, Tal and Libby) recount their time in the military and their experiences as young girls in a battle zone. They have different functions and different experiences, but they have one thing in common: they have come out of their service like a different person. What emerges most from Yarom’s film, it is even literally expressed, is the fact that the war creates an alternative reality in which existing frameworks for many people blur. Boundaries of right and wrong, of appropriate and inappropriate, disappear as you engage in an intense struggle against a people who harbor a deep-seated hatred of you. All these things leave an indelible impression on the various women. Impressive are scenes in which the women describe how they oppress and often abuse Palestinians or how the bodies of the dead victims of Israeli actions are handled. And above all, how much this was an almost self-evident part of their reality there. At such moments, ‘To See If I’m Smiling’ evokes memories of the scandal surrounding the photos of humiliated prisoners from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

‘To See If I’m Smiling’ is disturbing at times and emotional at other times without really going over the edge. In that respect, the maker avoids extensive emotional elaborations. What does Tamar Yarom want to tell us with this documentary? Not so much an emphatically propagated moral point of view, but the harsh and confrontational reality of a war situation. How did the girls behave? What choices did they make in certain situations and how did they deal with the power conferred on them by the gun they owned? Meytal realizes, no doubt like the rest, that these are memories she will probably always carry with her. The fact that the war is a major event and can make a crushing impression on someone who experiences it up close has of course been known for some time, but is made clear in this documentary in an impressive and poignant way.