Photo above still from film. Photo below: Director Yoav Shamir in conversation with the audience after the world premiere of his film 10% here in Nyon.
Film review “10%” – to be shown Sunday 21st April 12:15 at the Capitole 1 Buy a ticket here
In the film “10%” director Yoav Shamir, asks “What makes a hero?” and attempts to give an answer by taking us on a world wide tour from New York to the Congo, Slovenia, South Africa, Israel and Palestine. He tries to find a typical pattern in what makes a hero. In the film we meet many people along the way who have committed acts of heroism in various forms, from a guy in New York who threw himself under a subway train to save a life of someone who had fallen on the tracks, to a Belgian woman who hid Jews in her apartment during the second world war, to a white woman in South Africa who grew up protesting against apartheid and went against the grain of her peer group.
This subject makes for a fascinating documentary. The characters, the heros that he speaks to are widely different; there is no common thread as to why each hero has gone the extra mile to help a fellow human being. The “hero” that Shamir seems to be most affected by is one of his “own”, Yonatan Shapira, an ex-Israeli pilot who, like Shamir, trained with the Israeli army, but who then went on to denounce the Israeli government, to openly criticise them and accuse them of genocide, resulting in him being labelled a traitor in his own country but a hero elsewhere. This makes Shamir reassess his own position. He attempts to join Yonatan in a protest. There is a telling moment when Yonatan says to camera “you only need to taste tear gas in your mouth that was aimed at the Palestinians, to take that last bit of Zionism you ever had out of you”. Shamir looks openly shaken. The film has a hint of self mockery and irony throughout but in this scene, the seriousness of what it really takes to be a hero is brought home to the director. This is a long film interspersed with research and comments from professors and scientists with their opinion of what makes a hero, some of these scenes could possibly be cut a bit shorter and wouldn’t lose much in the telling. Nevertheless its is a fascinating documentary. Shamir himself is a hero for having made it.