Kippur

Synopsis

Nearly thirty years ago, Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack against Israel. The brief, intense war that followed called the Yom Kippur War, after the Jewish holiday on which the fighting started, is the subject of Amos Gitai's film. The battlefield action in the film is bloody and relentless; Gitai is working in the close- to-the-ground, hyper-realist mode of Sam Fuller's Big Red One and the opening battle sequences of Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan. War, according to this style of filmmaking, is an existential, rather than political, event. The causes and even, in this case, the outcome of the conflict matter less than the experiences of the men who fight. Kippur has been described as an anti-war movie. Not because it takes a stand against the Yom Kippur War, or war in general - the soldiers in the film accept the necessity of fighting, and the film never questions their commitment. Rather, it is because Gitai does his utmost to resist the conventions of the genre.