“The Men Beyond the Wall: Sex, Truths, and Apps” is the title of my debut column on Revista Zum’s website. In it, I discuss the award-winning documentary by Inés Moldavsky, winner of the Golden Bear for Best Short Film at Berlin in 2018.
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The Men Behind the Wall, by Israeli director Inés Moldavsky (1990), won the Golden Bear for Best Short Film at the 2018 Berlin Film Festival. A transmedia documentary, it combines interviews with men of various ages in the West Bank and online conversations with men in Gaza. Everyone involved in the film, except Inés, is Palestinian. All were contacted through dating apps such as Tinder and OkCupid with proposals for casual sexual encounters.
Other films have used the internet in their construction and moved across interfaces to compose a narrative. Take, for example, Kiko Goifman’s 33 (2002), which combined an online diary with a detective film. Incidentally, Goifman, together with Claudia Priscilla, also won the Teddy Award for Best Documentary at the Berlin International Film Festival this year for Bixa Travesty. But what distinguishes The Men Behind the Wall is that here the internet is virtually one of the film’s participants. It operates as an escape route through the massive barrier between Israel and the Palestinian territories, the West Bank wall, whose construction began exactly fifteen years ago.