Created by Sayed Kashua, a 32-year-old Israeli-born Palestinian journalist, Arab Labor (translated from the Hebrew “Avoda Aravit” which colloquially implies second-rate work) focuses on Amjad, a Palestinian journalist and Israeli citizen in search of his identity as he seeks high status in the society into which he was born but where his car is searched everyday when he drives from his neighborhood to his job at a newspaper in Jerusalem.
Soon after the Yom Kippur War, a short philosophical tract entitled Life According to the Intellect was published in Israel, and Moshe Kroy, a twenty-five-year-old Doctor of Philosophy became a kind of local guru for one turbulent year. The Theory of Rational Egoism that he developed fell on the eager ears of all the people fed up with all the fallen ideologies. Hagai, who was now about to enter the army, becomes a student of Kroy and documents him too. For years he follows the dramatic turnabouts in Kroy’s philosophy but also in his life. He even follows Kroy to Australia to confront him about what seemed at first to be like a return to religion, or was it to madness?The remarkable story of Moshe Kroy is one of the most extreme examples that this country has known. It is the story of a genius who paid every imaginable price in his uncompromising effort to reach the truth.
In the last two years of her life, the poet Yona Wallach suddenly became a public figure. The scandal caused by her poem “Tefillin” had serious cultural and political implications, her poems set to music became radio hits, and the way she dealt with her cancer was covered intimately by the entire media. Hagai met Yona once as an adolescent and was exposed even then to the cruelty and madness so closely associated with her. He returned to her years afterward to document her as she took account of her life and described the love she felt for the young man living with her. Yona speaks the way she wrote and lives, with boundless intensity, intoxicatedly beautiful language, and rare courage.
Series description:
In this innovative new series, Hagai Levi portrays four Israeli cultural heroes who fluctuated between genius and madness. These artists rebelled with rage and scorn at the bourgeois lifestyle and dominant culture, and endeavored to create an avant-garde alternative. The series offers a glimpse into the spirit of Israel in the 1970s and 1980s, a time which seemed to offer one last chance to live an alternative lifestyle. The Accursed investigates the idea of the total artist, examining whether and to what degree we are prepared to pay a steep price for the creative truth burning inside us.
Episode One:
In the 1960s and 1970s, the book “Life as a Parable” had a cult following. Poet Meir Wieseltier said that it had the same “revelatory impact as the launching of the Sputnik into space.” Young people followed Pinchas Sadeh like a prophet, and came knocking on his door in the middle of the night. Hagai, a trouble, self-destructive teen from a religious kibbutz, was one of them. He felt that Sadeh could change his life, and perhaps even save it, so he worked up the courage to meet with him and photographed their encounter on his Super-8 camera. A single knock on the door began a relationship that lasted thirty years, in which Hagai would document Sadeh up until his death. His admiration turned into anger and criticism, though it finally turned into acceptance. Through this relationship he was able to get an intimate look at Sadeh’s total approach to life, at the young women who surrounded him at all times, and at the young people nearest the author, many of whom ended up killing themselves. We come face to face with all the scandals, but also with Sadeh’s books and poems.
Season One comes to a close when Reut makes some serious changes in her life to regroup; Amir pursues Yifat seriously but might have made a mistake along the way; Nati opens his eyes to an overdue realization; Hodaya swears to become “unreligious.”
Reut discovers that her sister is getting married which causes an unexpected stir of her emotions; Nitzan throws Nati a surprise birthday party much to his dismay as the distance builds between them; Amir and Yifat grow even closer, but is Amir being completely honest?
Yifat is riddled with mixed emotions, in love with two different men—one who loves her and one who rejected her; sparks fly between Nati and Nitzan, but will it last? Hodaya’s niece comes to visit, creating a world of trouble for her aunt.
The bond builds between Amir and Yifat; Reut’s boyfriend tries to get a job, he’s still insecure about her career; Nati connects with a stranger at a hospital fundraiser; and Shabbat dinner is almost back to normal, except for the tension in the air.
Reut and Amir visit Yifat at her new home, and Amir can’t stop coming back, while Reut’s boyfriend Yochai tries to prove himself to her, and Hodaya searches for answers regarding her forbidden love for Avri.
Episode 10: Hodaya bathes in the mikveh, even though she is an unmarried woman and she continues to question her relationship; Yifat takes a leap of faith and moves away from Jerusalem to Ma’ale Elisha, and Nati tries to make different plans for Shabbat.
