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=Walk On Water (2004 Israeli Film)=

Plot
Israeli Mossad agent, Eyal, is given a slightly less challenging assignment after his wife’s recent suicide. He was told to track down and kill an aging ex-Nazi officer, Alfred Himmelman, by disguising himself as a tour guide for his target’s grandson Axel. Axel is in Israel visiting his sister Pia, who lives on a kibbutz (an Israeli commune), to try and persuade her to return to Germany for their father’s seventieth birthday. On their many trips together, Eyal befriends Axel and later Pia, which makes his mission all the more difficult. As the child of Holocaust survivors, Eyal struggles to forgive Nazi perpetrators and, in turn, their children and grandchildren. However, Befriending Axel and Pia help him realize that some Germans are not involved with the hatred portrayed in the Holocaust. While staying at the Kibbutz, Eyal places an audio bug in Pia’s room that caught Pia revealing to Axel that her estrangement from their parents is a result of her discovering that they were hiding her ex-Nazi grandfather. A couple of days later, Eyal, Axel, and Pia go to a restaurant where Axel asks a Palestinian waiter, named Rafik, where he can find the best club in town. When they arrive at the club, Eyal is taken back when he realizes that it is a gay club and that Axel and Rafik are dancing together. Throughout the rest of the trip, Eyal acts very hostile towards Rafik and Axel as tensions between Israeli’s and Palestinians grow due to the Second Intifada and because of his slight homophobia. When Axel goes back to Germany, Eyal follows him to say sorry about the way he acted but also to finish his mission. In Germany, Axel invites Eyal to his father’s birthday party when Axel’s parents surprise the guests by inviting Axel’s grandfather, Alfred Himmelman, to join their celebration. Axel is enraged at his parents for hiding the truth about his grandfather and goes into Eyal’s room to apologize, only to find Eyal’s briefcase full of information about his family. At that moment, Axel finds out that Eyal is an Israeli Mossad agent who aimed to kill his grandfather. Later, Eyal sneaks into Axel’s house to kill his grandfather but is unable to because he was tired of killing. Eyal was tired of killing after his recently deceased wife left him a note saying that “he kills everything that comes near him.” Unexpectedly, when Eyal leaves, Axel takes it upon himself to kill his grandfather. Fast forward two years later, Eyal and Pia are married and have a child named Tom while Eyal and Axel remain good friends.

Historical Background
The movie Walk on Water ties together two somber historical events: the Holocaust and the Second Intifada. The Mossad, Israeli Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations, is the national intelligence agency of Israel, roughly equivalent to that of the United States CIA. After the Holocaust, the Mossad carried out a series of spy operations to capture ex-Nazi war criminals. As said in the film, the purpose of these operations was to bring justice to war criminals “before God does.” One of the most successful Mossad operations was the capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1960, a major organizer of the Holocaust and, more specifically, the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” While the film's main focus is on the Mossad and capturing an ex-Nazi, tensions were present that are a result of the Second Intifada. The Second Intifada was an uprising of Palestinians against Israel which was triggered by the failure of the 2000 Camp David Summit to reach a final decision on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. As shown in the movie, the Intifada has a considerable effect on daily life in Israel, and interactions between Israeli’s and Palestinians grew more hostile as a result.

Production
Walk on Water premiered on February 5, 2004, at the Berlin International Film Festival. In Israel, it premiered on March 18, 2004. And lastly, it premiered in the United States on October 24, 2004, at the Milwaukee International Festival. The film was extremely successful internationally, making a total of $7 million worldwide on a budget of $1.4 million. In the United States, it grossed $142,000 in one weekend making the movie the highest-grossing Israeli production at the U.S. box office. The psychological/political drama was nominated for eight Israeli Film Academy Awards, including best picture, best director, best actor (Lior Ashkenazi), and best screenplay. Ultimately it won two Ophir statuettes for best music (Ivri Lider) and, in a tie with Year Zero, best sound.

The director of Walk on Water, Eytan Fox, was born in New York City, but his family immigrated to Israel when he was two years old. He grew up in Jerusalem with a conservative rabbi for a father while his mother served on the Jerusalem city council. Fox served in the army and later on went to study at the Tel Aviv University School of Film and Television. Fox is openly gay and has been with his partner, Gal Uchovsky, for over 18 years. Uchovsky has been involved in the scriptwriting of many of Fox’s films, including Walk on Water, and has become one of the most influential gay men in Israel as a vocal advocate for gay rights.

The three main characters in the film, Eyal, Axel, and Pia, share common cultural backgrounds with their actors. Lior Ashkenazi, who plays Eyal, is an Israeli actor, comedian, and television personality. He was born in Ramat Gan, Israel to Sephardi Jewish emigrants from Istanbul, Turkey. Ashkenazi studied acting at Beit Zvi, and upon graduating, he worked for Habima and Beersheba Theater. Similarly, Knut Berger, who plays Axel, shares a similar cultural background to his character because of his German nationality. Berger was born in Gelsenkirchen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. Lastly, Caroline Peters, who portrays Pia, is also of German descent and was born in Mainz, Germany. Peters not only shares a cultural background with her character but, has also indicated that her own grandfather had also been a Nazi.

Homosexuality in Israeli Film
In Israeli society and films, discourses about homosexuals and the idea of homosexuality are often used to interpret the power relations between men and the degree of masculinity, especially in the IDF. Eytan Fox, the director of Walk on Water, explores themes of homosexuality and masculinity complex in many of his movies. Many of Fox’s early films were developed with homosexual undertones while his more recent films had homosexuality as the main focus. Most prominently, Fox’s film Yossi and Jager (2002), which explored the love story between two male officers in the IDF, was Fox’s breakthrough international hit. As portrayed in Walk on Water by the dynamic between Eyal and Axel, homosexuality is often seen as a quality that makes one slow and naive because it is linked to passivity and weakness. When Eyal realizes that Axel is a gay man, his right-winged homophobic ideals make him see Axel as an inferior man. Similarly, many IDF soldiers look down upon homosexuality as a feminine attribute which coincides with the masculinity theory. The army in Israel, to this day, “remains a masculine institution, positing the warrior as a key symbol of Israeli manhood” (Gershenson). All men and women are required to serve in the army, which leads to these ideas of masculinity being present in Israeli society after finishing service in the IDF. As a result, many Israeli films focus not only on masculinity theory in the IDF but also in modern society.

Ending Scene
The film's initial scenes reference violent behaviors and boundaries set forth with the idea of holocaust retribution whereas the final scenes depict a utopian fantasy for the main characters. Eyal and Pia are happily married and living on the Kibbutz with their newborn son while Axel maintains a stable relationship with his partner Andreas. Throughout the film, Eyal and Axel’s relationship is based on a certain level of hostility due to their different views and lifestyles while in the ending scene they are portrayed as close friends that have embraced each other’s way of life. Earlier in the movie, Eyal brings Axel to the Sea of Galilee, where Jesus is prophesied to have walked on the water. Whereas Axel had initially failed to walk on water, in the films parting shot, Axel and Eyal walk on water, metaphorically, on the Sea of Galilee with their arms stretched to their sides in a cross-like position. The cross-like position produced by Eyal and Axel’s joint walking resembles the cross upon which Jesus was sacrificed and can therefore be seen as a personification of Jesus. The reenactment of Jesus’s greatest miracles by a German and an Israeli is symbolic of the bridging of Germany and Israel and, therefore, of Christianity and Judaism. The Sea of Galilee, or Kinneret, is seen by some as the birthplace of Christianity and is also the site of the first Jewish Kibbutz, Deganya, in 1909. The kibbutz was a tentative experiment in communal life whose aim was to create a Jewish working class in Palestine. In this way, the reenactment of one of Jesus’s greatest miracles in the birthplace of Christianity and the Jewish working class can be seen as the union of the two religions.