It sounds like an episode of “Black Mirror”: There are two Deakla Keydars in the Israeli television industry, but they have been morphed into one person by the IMDb online movie bible.
So, for the record, the Deakla Keydar who wrote the award-winning TV series “The Lesson” – “Sha’at Efes” (“Zero Hour”) in Hebrew – wasn't born in the northern town of Afula, didn't star in the kids’ TV shows “Hashminiya” (“The Eight”) or “Ha-E” (“The Island”), and is most definitely not blonde.
The Deakla Keydar we’re interested in (no offense to child actors on seminal Israeli kids’ shows) was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1975. Her parents moved back to Israel a few months later, leaving her to curse them for not giving her perfect English. (For the record, her English is very good and she barely pauses for breath during a highly entertaining 50-minute Zoom chat.)
Keydar went to school in Tel Aviv and wanted to be a writer for as long as she can remember. As far as is known, Afula hasn't figured largely in her life.
Her six-part drama “The Lesson” was a huge hit and an even bigger talking point when it aired on the Kan public broadcaster last year – with some of the characters spouting so much anti-Arab hatred they sounded like the youth wing of the Otzma Yehudit party.
As well as winning local acclaim, the show claimed the best series and best actress awards at 2022’s Canneseries TV festival in France. And international audiences can see what all the fuss is about as the show is now screening on the excellent ChaiFlicks streaming service (in North America, Britain, Australia and New Zealand – and expanding into some key non-English territories in the future).
More than intense
“The Lesson” is a powerful and compelling drama, one that doesn’t shy from showing Israel’s uglier side – okay, one of Israel’s uglier sides – as it puts Jewish supremacism on prime-time TV (and not just the evening news).
It’s inspired by an incident in 2014 when a right-wing 12th-grader in Kiryat Tivon, northern Israel, complained about the “leftist views” of her civics teacher, Adam Verete, who dared question the morality of the Israel Defense Forces and the very idea of a Jewish state.
He survived a school disciplinary hearing over the matter, but still ended up losing his job a few months later due to “budget cuts.” The whereabouts of the right-wing student, Sapir Sabah, are unknown, but it would be no surprise to learn that she’s now running the country.
According to Keydar, "Students in high school, it’s always the first question they ask: ‘Did you write her … fat?’ So, yeah, I did. And then the next question is: ‘Okay, so how did you call the agents of actors and did you say you were looking for [someone overweight]?’”
Keydar first developed her ideas about “The Lesson” in 2017 and instantly knew that it would need to be a TV series, not a novel like her previous works. She has published eight books for kids, young adults and adults, with translations available in the likes of China and Germany but none, alas, in English-speaking countries – though she did have her short story “Slow Cooking” translated for the 2014 compendium “Tel Aviv Noir.”
It took a further three years before she penned her story about a classroom fight between a lefty civics teacher, Amir, and his obese (yes, this is relevant) 12th-grade student, Lianne. That quickly spirals out of control thanks to social media, transporting the story from a sleepy central Israeli city to the national news.
“I told many people during the process what the show is about,” Keydar recounts, “and when I said, ‘It’s about a teacher and student that have a fight and it changes their lives, it ruins their lives,’ everybody was like, ‘Sounds interesting.’
“And then I said, ‘It’s civics and Arabs, and Kfar Sava’ – and everybody got old and died! [I don’t know if Deakla is using a literal translation of a Hebrew saying here, but I intend to steal it.] And I could understand that because when I come back from work – you know, from the sofa to the sofa – I like to watch trashy reality shows, not reality.”
As Keydar tells it, no one was more surprised than she was when the show became the talk of the town (not just in Kfar Sava) and proved a mutigenerational hit – Israeli schoolkids were as likely to be discussing it as teachers or retired principals.
Indeed, almost 18 months after the show premiered, Keydar is still talking about “The Lesson” in schools across the country – and Lianne’s weight is always the first subject of interest for youngsters.
“I had like maybe 60 encounters with people who wanted to talk about the series from different angles. And the students in high school, it’s always the first question they ask: ‘Did you write her … fat?’ So, yeah, I did. And then the next question is: ‘Okay, so how did you call the agents of actors and did you say you were looking for [someone overweight]?’”
Lianne is brilliantly played by Maya Landsmann, who really makes you have sympathy for the devilish racist – which is also a testament to Keydar’s determination not to demonize anyone and her ability to present fully fleshed-out characters, whether they be rightists or right-on liberals.
“I knew that this character would be a teenager with low self-esteem. And if it was prose, I could write it in a different way. But because it’s something you have to see all the time,” Keydar explains, it was clear to her that Lianne would have weight issues and feel uncomfortable in her own skin. (Though, speaking of skin, in the first draft the character had chronic acne – and imagine ringing up an actor’s agent seeking that particular requirement.)
The show is fearless in its representation of modern Israel, though Keydar feels that everything in “The Lesson” has already been superseded by the ugliness of Israel's current far-right government. In fact, she says, when people praise her for the show’s topicality and relevance, she's quick to correct them. What felt “completely psycho” a few years ago now feels like the good old days, she says.
"I think it’s not about school or politics or racism," Keydar says. "It’s just about people with problems. And what I understood from this experience makes me a little more optimistic that stories can still connect people.”
One thing everyone can agree on – finally there’s one thing Israelis can agree on other than how much they love Eurovision – is that the show is structured around huge confrontations between the Lianne and Amir characters (the latter is sympathetically played by Doron Ben-David, who is still best known as the lovable Steve in “Fauda”).
But while the audience will be appreciative of all this (especially a very powerful scene set on a breakfast TV show), the actors were perhaps a little less so.
“In every episode there’s a big scene for which the actors wanted to kill me! Each scene goes on for 15 pages – but I wanted to kill myself as well, because it was so hard,” Keydar laughs. I think she’s joking when she says she was ready to be hospitalized after writing so many intense scenes.
From Colombia to Sri Lanka
One thing I’m always fascinated by when watching Israeli shows is how easily they might translate for an international audience, either in their original form or as an adaptation.
It was no surprise, for instance, to learn that a U.K.-based adaptation of Keshet Studio’s stunning surrogacy drama “A Body That Works” (“Gouf Shlishi” in Hebrew) is currently in the works.
But I was more surprised to learn from Keydar that international audiences have really connected with “The Lesson” – which could only be more Israeli if every scene featured people spitting out sunflower hulls while trying to cut into a line.
Mind you, she too was taken aback by that response. “I was very, very surprised how an international audience could identify with it,” she says, recounting how people in countries from Colombia and France to Sri Lanka would tell her how much the show chimed with their own experience.
Of course, racism isn’t unique to Kfar Sava, a Tel Aviv suburb, but there’s something very specific to Israel about key plot points – especially those revolving around Jewish-Arab tensions and a school system that helps prepare 12th-graders for the army.
Keydar admits to being frightened when she was screening the show in Berlin, “because what could they know about this classroom where it’s like a zoo, unlike European schools. But I think it’s not about school or politics or racism; it’s just about people with problems. And what I understood from this makes me a little more optimistic that stories can still connect people.”
When I separately ask ChaiFlicks’ chief Neil Friedman if he has any worries that his subscribers might blanch at a series that shows Israeli racism warts and all, he shakes his head. “I’m not concerned about that. I’m really focused on quality. For ChaiFlicks, it’s all about the writing and the quality of the programming.
“You know,” he continues, “we’re politically agnostic. Because we’re a cultural channel, we’re not trying to proselytize any political point of view. We want people to make their own decisions.”
That could also serve as a perfect summation of Keydar’s strengths as a writer on “The Lesson.” And having belatedly experienced the world of television, Beijing will just have to wait for her next novel, as she seems in no hurry to return to penning prose.
She’s currently writing a show set in the legal world, but one thing definitely not in the works is a second season of “The Lesson.” In fact, Keydar is shocked that so many people saw the show’s resolution as open-ended.
“That was the biggest surprise for me as the writer,” she says. I can only assume that audiences felt the same as I did – that having spent six nerve-shredding episodes with these two fascinating yet polar opposites, we want to find out what happens to them next, or in five years.
“I don’t see a bright future for them,” she says of her protagonists. “I think that they learned something about themselves and about the power of words and myths, and paid a big price for their mistakes.”
In other words, they got the kind of lesson you don’t normally learn at school, whether that’s in Kfar Sava or Berlin.
“The Lesson” is on ChaiFlicks internationally with English subtitles, and on the Kan portal in Israel.
Click the alert icon to follow topics:
"TV" - Google News
June 25, 2023 at 07:23PM
https://ift.tt/unhfGi7
The Show That Put Jewish Supremacism on Prime-time TV - Television - Haaretz
"TV" - Google News
https://ift.tt/R6vW8xK
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "The Show That Put Jewish Supremacism on Prime-time TV - Television - Haaretz"
Post a Comment