In October 1973 during the Jewish festival of Yom Kippur an Arab coalition led by Syria and Egypt launched a pre-emptive strike against Israel . The Israelis wre caught with their pants down and the Eygyptians made initial gains in the south of Israel . Within three days the Israelis managed to rally their forces and by the end of the month the Israelis had managed to deal a decisive blow to the Arabs in general and the Eyptians in particular that Egypt never again threatened Israel . That said the 1973 war remains the closest the Israelis have come to losing a war and this 2000 Israeli film makes a powerful anti-war statement that war is a brutal and terrible thing even for the victors . As Bertrand Russell once said " There's no winners or losers , only survivors "
Congratulations to director Amos Gitai for showing war for what it is . Based upon his own experiences of the conflict this is both straight from the heart and straight from the horses mouth which shows the human cost of conflict . The story centres around a small microcosm of the war where two Israeli soldiers caught up in the chaos volunteer for a medical unit carrying out cavesac of wounded IDF troops
If there's a problem to KIPPUR it's probably too realistic for its own good . The camera doesn't do much , the average shot length is overly long , there's long segments devoid of dialogue and there's little in the way of incidental music . In other words this is a movie that should be studied long and hard at University film classes as an example of realism in cinema , but possibly won't be better known beyond that . By a bitter irony it won't be acclaimed as being an anti-war classic because .... well you know who's going to feel sorry about Israeli soldiers being maimed and killed in a conflict where it's the Arabs who are the aggressors ?
As a footnote one thing that is distracting is the tanks used which are Merkava tanks which didn't enter service until 1979 . In 1973 the Israelis would have been using the British made Centurion as their main battle tank , but that said nearly every single war film you'll ever see has the same type of anachronism where tanks are involved
Congratulations to director Amos Gitai for showing war for what it is . Based upon his own experiences of the conflict this is both straight from the heart and straight from the horses mouth which shows the human cost of conflict . The story centres around a small microcosm of the war where two Israeli soldiers caught up in the chaos volunteer for a medical unit carrying out cavesac of wounded IDF troops
If there's a problem to KIPPUR it's probably too realistic for its own good . The camera doesn't do much , the average shot length is overly long , there's long segments devoid of dialogue and there's little in the way of incidental music . In other words this is a movie that should be studied long and hard at University film classes as an example of realism in cinema , but possibly won't be better known beyond that . By a bitter irony it won't be acclaimed as being an anti-war classic because .... well you know who's going to feel sorry about Israeli soldiers being maimed and killed in a conflict where it's the Arabs who are the aggressors ?
As a footnote one thing that is distracting is the tanks used which are Merkava tanks which didn't enter service until 1979 . In 1973 the Israelis would have been using the British made Centurion as their main battle tank , but that said nearly every single war film you'll ever see has the same type of anachronism where tanks are involved