Silvina Landsmann

A look inside the work of Breaking the Silence, an organization of former IDF combat soldiers who collect and publish testimonies of soldiers who served in the occupied territories. For six months, director Silvina Landsmann, camera in hand, accompanied the staff of the organization. The many hours of footage have been refined into a film that dives into the heart of Breaking the Silence’s work: guided tours of Hebron and the surrounding area, public lectures and house meetings, internal staff meetings and media strategy. All the while the organization is forced to justify its very existence, both internally and to the broader public, and to justify its place in the political debate. The Good Soldier raises questions about Israel’s dynamic mainstream and the challenges of confronting it.

For five weeks in November and December 1995, the filmmaker followed life at the Paul Vaillant-Couturier junior secondary school at Champigny sur Marne. Although it is a standard shool, it also has a special SEGPA section (General and Adapted Professional Education Stream), as well as a class for non-French-speaking children, known as the "NFs". Twenty seven nationalities were present in the school at the time of shooting. Filming school activities, lessons in the different sections, professional guidance interviews, the search for training courses, the annual cross country race and administrative jobs, the filmmaker gives a direct uncommented account of the current challenges facing state schools.

Hotline gets to the heart of a small NGO based in Tel Aviv: The Hotline for Refugees and Migrants. In exactly inverse proportion to the small-scale of this human rights organization, the issues they deal with are enormous, as are the numbers of those seeking help.