My main reason to go to the DocAviv film festival, in Tel Aviv, was to see the Snowden film, “Citizen Four”, which hadn’t been shown in this country till now. I also looked for another film for the same day, and so bought tickets for that too. This was “Monsoon”. As it happened, I enjoyed Monsoon more.
“Citizen Four” was much more of a personal film about Snowden than I had anticipated. As the camera rolled on, in Snowden’s tiny Hong Kong hotel room, I began to feel a little cramped and uncomfortable about being in the room with him. I was expecting the film to be more about the privacy and surveillance issue itself and began to wonder if people would understand the value of the revelations and not start to feel irked, as I did, by the amount of time spent on the man himself. But perhaps this was just a case of mistaken expectations. Dorit and Yotam, who had joined me, felt fine with the movie and said that the message came through perfectly.
The full-length Canadian documentary, “Monsoon”, was meticulously made and interesting throughout. It had everything that I could have wanted it to do with the subject. It approached it scientifically, philosophically, had personal stories and beautiful photography. The narrator told the story with sensitivity and humour. I didn’t check whether it has captured any prizes so far, but it certainly deserves to do so.