The 16th annual Israeli Film Festival is hosting a screening of the first feature film in Israeli cinema dealing with the subject of parents with a gender-questioning child.
“Melting Away” follows the story of a teenager who is kicked out of his family’s house because his homophobic father is in shock when he discovers his son’s cross-dressing and gender-questioning. Years later, the mother hires a private investigator to find her son and tell him his father is dying of cancer and that she would like to reconnect.
But the former son — now living as a woman (played by Chen Yani) and performing at a gay cabaret — is unwilling to even speak to her parents, holding a deep resentment toward them for throwing her out when she was a teenage boy. However, curiosity gets the better of her and she decides to dress up as a nurse and visit her father daily.
Israeli director and producer Doron Eran said that while he has been trying to get this script made into a film for a long time, it took a real-life tragedy to inspire him to finally get the story onto the screen.
“My wife wrote the script about four years ago and we planned to shoot it in Toronto,” he said. “It’s inspired by a true story of a family that I knew in my neighborhood about 17 years ago. I went to Toronto and I tried to create the production there and the economic downturn destroyed the company in Toronto, so I came back to Israel. I put the script aside and I carried on in other projects. In 2009, a guy came into a workshop of young gays and lesbians [in Tel Aviv] and he shot them. He killed two of them and 15 of them were wounded. It was all over Israeli TV and we sat at home, me and my wife, watching it. It was on all three channels and the country was in shock.
But after that the channels went to the hospital and around one in the morning the guy in the television set said that some of the parents don’t want to come and visit their children because they don’t want their neighbors to see on the TV that their kids are homosexuals and lesbians. That was the idea and motivation behind picking up this script again.”
Eran said that while he believes the attack was an anomaly in Tel Aviv, which is Israel’s most liberal city, further research found that antigay sentiment outside the city are far more common.
“Even though my motivation was because of this crazy guy who shot these kids, we believed there was no problem with the leaders in Israel. On television, we have ‘Israeli Idol’ and one of the jurors there, she’s transgender. Everybody told me that there is no problem in Israel because every kid in Israel sees her in prime time. But slowly, when I came and did the research, I found that outside of Tel Aviv, it’s so totally different. Just like New York in America is quite different from the South in the United States. Slowly I found very sad stories. One of the saddest stories I found through my research was in the north of Israel. The youngest kid in the family, the father found out that he liked women’s clothes so he tied him to the bed and, for three months, he gave him shots of hormones to make him a man. I thought it was one of the most horrible stories I’ve heard in my life.”
Eran added that in those areas, the film often struggles to impart its message even to those willing to understand it.
“People ask me if the people in Israel are ready for this kind of movie. And I said yes, of course,” Eran said. “I don’t see any problem. But even now, when I distributed the film in Israel, in Tel Aviv everybody came to see the film. But when I screened it in the north and south of Israel, very few people came. It was hard for them to get this story. Even at the premiere, when the television came and interviewed the audience, people said, ‘It’s a very good movie. We love the movie. We believed it happened. But until it comes to our family, to our house … ’ So in the center of Israel, I don’t see any problem with these kinds of stories but outside of Tel Aviv, I believe people still don’t get this and they don’t want to understand this.”
But Eran said he wasn’t frustrated by the lack of empathy some audiences had after viewing the film.
“It is because of that I made this movie,” he said. “I have three children and I think that a parent, when you decide to make a kid, you must understand that you must love them with no conditions. That is what the film is about. If one parent would see this movie and they had a problem like that in their home and if this movie changed their way of thinking, I did it. I believe movies can change ways of thinking and I hope I did it here.
“Two days ago, I got a call from a guy late at night and he said, ‘I saw your film with my mother and we cried through the screening. We stayed for about 20 minutes after everyone left the theater. And I wanted to tell you thanks very much for giving me this gift of this movie.’ And I said, ‘Thank God you called me because a filmmaker needs that sometimes.’”
Besides earning praise from individual viewers, “Melting Away” has been screened at and won acclaim from film festivals all over Europe and North America, including the Tel Aviv International LGBT Film Festival. Eran, who has participated in Q&A sessions for the film, said he is often asked why a straight director and screenwriter would write and champion a film about LGBT subject matter.
“People ask me why I made this film because it’s not my world,” Eran said. “I said that I made this movie for parents. I knew this family 17 years ago. It is a very good story because it’s a very dramatic situation. I made this film for parents, not especially for kids and gays and lesbians. North of Tel Aviv, if two guys are walking holding hands, in about half an hour someone will hit them. There are not one or two days that pass without something like that happening. So it’s a very good idea to make a film on this kind of subject, because I believe that this film can change people’s ways of thinking. And if we can save some kids that cannot get the support from their parents, we made it.
One of the questions in the movie I wanted fathers to ask themselves is, when his own boy decides to change his [gender] and be a woman, what does it mean about him and what he thinks about himself and his sexuality? Sometimes we want to control a kid’s life so much and so hard that we forget that when we make a child and we give them life, it’s his life. It’s not our life. So we have to respect that.” n
The 16th annual Israeli Film Festival runs through April 1. “Melting Away” is screened 8:45 p.m. March 31 at Mitchell Auditorium, 3128 Market St., followed by a reception with a guest appearance by lead actor Chen Yani. For more information or tickets, visit www.iffphila.com.
Larry Nichols can be reached at [email protected].