Three Things Lost | JFI Online Short: November 2024
This month’s online short is Three Things Lost, directed by Naama Shohet.
Naama Shohet, 2019, Israel, United States, 14 minutes, Hebrew
About the Film: Home, bond, and faith: these are the three things lost from the life of Iraqi-Israeli writer Issac Bar-Moshe, the director’s grandfather. A journey between text and visual images generates a miracle and the three things are discovered again.
Watch the film and read an exclusive interview with director Naama Shohet below.
Jewish Film Institute: What was the starting point for Three Things Lost?
Naama Shohet: The film was created as a final project in my fourth year at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem. I studied in the Screen-Based Arts department, specializing in video and new media, focusing on creating experimental films that incorporate animation. All the films I created during my studies focused on my personal stories. My grandfather was always a mysterious and inspiring figure in our family. He passed away when I was 10, so I never truly got to know him. In my final year of studies, I decided to dive into his complex story. Through the film, I attempted to get to know my grandfather posthumously and, more broadly, to connect with my family roots through my artistic language.
JFI: The film pivots on a continually modified text excerpt, presumably from your grandfather’s writings. Can you share more about this specific passage and the inspiration you’ve found in it?
NS: The text in the film is based on a short story written by my grandfather, Yitzhak Bar Moshe, titled “The House of Sa’id”. The story is about a man who goes to visit his friend, a writer named Sa’id. Upon arriving at the writer’s house, he finds that the house has vanished, and the entire story revolves around the man’s quest to find his friend. In the end, Sa’id reappears, emerging from nothingness, as it turns out he was so engrossed in writing a new research piece that he disappeared entirely from physical reality.
“The film, Three Lost Things, deals with a house that repeatedly disappears. I used my grandfather’s story, with its inherent repetition, and infused it with his personal journey.”
The film begins with his migration to Israel. The house in Iraq, his homeland, disappears. Later, the vanishing mailbox represents the loss of connection to the Zionist home he established with complete faith in Israel, driven by the desire to create a peaceful state alongside Palestinians. When he realized that dreams of peace weren’t coming true, he left Israel with a heavy heart and passed away in England, which marked the second home that disappeared from his life. At the film’s end, a lost Muslim prayer bead symbolizes his connection to his homeland, Iraq, as well as the chain of generations I am trying to continue through my work.
JFI: In combination with this text, you use a multi-layered visual approach. What brought you to use these rich, textured cinematic techniques?
NS: I studied in a highly unique program that encouraged me to combine documentary film techniques with video art and animation. Since the beginning of my studies, I experimented with blending different media in my films. I find that the combination of text and image creates a richer visual space that exists between the written and the visual, guiding viewers to where I want to lead them. Another technique I used in this film is scanning with an office scanner, an animation technique I continue to use to this day. Beyond the scanner’s technical aspect, scanning also has a conceptual dimension — processing fragments of memories and re-scanning them, which I find very moving.
JFI: Your grandfather’s Iraqi-Jewish identity is integral to the film and his work. Can you speak about this intersection between art and identity? How does his identity inform the three things lost?
NS: My entire family immigrated to Israel from Iraq. As a Jew labeled ‘Mizrahi,’ I grew up within the deep divide experienced by my grandparents and parents between Mizrahim (Jews from Arab countries) and Ashkenazim (Jews from Europe). Throughout my life, I heard stories about life in Iraq, the challenges of immigration to Israel, the reasons my family decided to leave Iraq, and the struggles they faced with Israeli society in the 1950s, which aimed to blur each community’s cultural traits to create a melting pot for a new Israeli-Jewish identity. Although 75 years have passed since Israel’s founding, the class gap between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews still exists in Israel.
It’s important for me to bring my family’s story, especially my grandfather’s, to the screen because he, who insisted on writing in Arabic until his death, felt culturally ostracized. His language was considered, and still is considered, the language of the enemy. From the pains inherited from previous generations, I try, through my artistic language, to revive the presence of my grandfather as a creator who wrote in Arabic, to bring my grandmother to the screen, and to portray the continuity of my Iraqi identity in the film. The hand pulling the prayer beads at the end of the film is my own, symbolizing my ‘taking the reins’ as a continuation of my cultural and family heritage.
About the Filmmaker: Naama Shohet (b. 1993) is a documentary video artist and animator. Her films have been screened at film festivals and art museums. Her film “Boxes” (2017) won the Ostrovsky Award for Experimental Cinema at the Jerusalem Film Festival. Her film “Dreams of Elsewhere” (2018) won the Best Experimental Film award at the Jerusalem Film Festival and was also featured at the Annecy Animation Festival in France. Her film “Three Things Lost” (2019) received an honourable mention at the Jerusalem Film Festival 2020 and at the 2021 EPOS Festival and was showcased in a solo exhibition at HaMidrasha Gallery in Tel Aviv. Her latest project, “The Monument,” earned her the Rappaport Prize for Art in Times of War (2024) and is currently in production. Naama also edits short animated films, including “Black Slide” (Uri Lotan, 2021), which made the Academy Awards® shortlist, and serves as a member of judging committees for film funds and film festivals.
About JFI Online Shorts: JFI Online Shorts features one new short film each month from emerging and established filmmakers. Since 2009, JFI has showcased over 100 online shorts and garnered worldwide views over 2 million on the JFI Youtube channel. Learn more at www.jfi.org.
