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Israeli Drama Film ‘Concerned Citizen’
Tackles Gentrification and Race Issues in Tel Aviv
T Sarah Rosen | JTA.org
he Israeli satirical drama film
“Concerned Citizen” opens
with the sacrosanct rituals of a
bourgeois Tel Aviv life: a robot vacuum
slides gracefully across the floor; lush
house plants are watered; vegetables
are blended into green juice. The score
from the Bellini opera “Norma” plays in
the background.

Then a car alarm rudely interrupts
the utopia.

20 JUNE 8, 2023 | JEWISH EXPONENT
It only gets worse from here for
Ben and Raz, a progressive Israeli
gay couple (played by actors Shlomi
Bertonov and Ariel Wolf, who are also
a couple in real life) living in a pristine
renovated apartment in a gentrifying
neighborhood in south Tel Aviv. When
Ben, a landscape architect, plants a tree
on their block, his seemingly innocent
desire to improve the neighborhood
quickly goes awry, and a series of
events forces him to face his own
repressed prejudices and hypocrisy.

With the tension of a thriller,
“Concerned Citizen,” the second
feature film by Israeli writer-director
Idan Haguel, tackles the universal
themes of privilege and multicultural
tension in gentrifying cities, using the
hyper-specific lens of Neve Sha’anan —
the south Tel Aviv neighborhood that’s
home to many of the country’s foreign
workers and asylum seekers, as well
as the city’s notoriously rundown (but
culturally vibrant) Central Bus Station.

After making its world premiere last
year at the famed Berlin International
Film Festival, the movie debuted in
select U.S. theaters last week and will
also be available to rent on Amazon
and Apple TV+.

Ben and Raz’s apartment, a hot
commodity in one of the world’s most
expensive cities, is the axis around
which much of the drama revolves. In
one scene, a French-Jewish woman
looks into buying the apartment sight
unseen. Their neighbors include both
the extremely vulnerable and the
Guy Sahaf via JTA.org
Shlomi Bertonov, right, as Ben in “Concerned Citizen”



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privileged: immigrants from Eritrea in
one apartment, and a writer plotting
his move to Berlin with his foreign wife
in another.

Idan Haguel spoke about the film and
his personal connections to it. After
losing his suitcase, Haguel chatted on
his phone from a cafe in Berlin before
heading to New York for the film’s
American release.

This conversation has been edited
and condensed.

based on the experience of living in
that neighborhood in south Tel Aviv,
being marinated in the dilemmas and
the daily complexity of living in Neve
Sha’anan as a bourgeois, middle class
person. After a few years I wanted
to comment on that. I wanted to be
brutally honest with myself and about
myself. So my daily life and the life of
my neighbors and friends became the
material with which I wrote this fictional
movie. Q: Tell me a little about
yourself and how you became
a filmmaker.

And you shot the film in your
old apartment!
A: I was born in the suburban city
Rishon LeTsiyon, and I always didn’t
know what to do with my life. After the
army, I decided to go to film school.

I wanted to be a scriptwriter, to do
comedies. I discovered filmmaking,
directing, and I gradually fell in love
with that part. Then after school, I
became a journalist because I couldn’t
make a film — it was very difficult for
me to get into that world. When my
journalism career ended abruptly by
the closing of the magazine [I worked
at], I decided that it’s now or never.

I made my first feature film, that was
a film called “Inertia.” That film is
based on childhood memories of my
grandparents. My grandparents were
immigrants from Lebanon, Romania
and Thessaloniki in Greece.

“Concerned Citizen” is partially
about immigration. Why was
it important to you to focus on
the immigrant experience?
I was drawn into the irony, and, some
may say, hypocrisy of living in a
country that historically was formed
by the narrative of [the Jew] being the
immigrant of the world, not accepted
into other countries, that in some
ways still holding that grudge against
countries that weren’t receptive to the
immigrant Jew and pushed immigrants
out. Of course, there is the horror story
of Germany and the Holocaust and
that’s the extreme end of mistreating
“the other.” So living in a country
formed by immigrants, [contrasted
with] the way we behave to immigrants
who are not part of the ethos of the
Jewish immigrant narrative — I was
drawn into that irony, although it wasn’t
an intellectual process. It was more
That was the mindfuck of the whole
production, because I made the story
close to me but I left a distance. I
used my experience but I created
these characters who are very close
but very different. I shot the therapy
scenes in my therapist’s clinic. I shot
the building scenes in my building on
my street. Everything became very,
very close and it was really an “Alice in
Wonderland” experience. Looking into
a mirror and everything is morphing
and making you look different and look
differently at yourself and your life.

Can you talk about the south
Tel Aviv neighborhood where
the film is set, Neve Sha’anan?
It’s the outskirts of the center of Tel
Aviv. It was always an immigrant
neighborhood. But it changed over the
years, it became working immigrants.

In the ‘90s, there were the Romanian
immigrants, and then it was Chinese
immigrants who came to work in Israel.

And over the last 15 years it has become
immigrants from Africa, combined with
older people who have lived there
years and new people who are the
more gentrifiers of the neighborhood,
artists and gay people and those who
are more economically stable. So now
the neighborhood is comprised of sex
workers, immigrants, junkies, dealers
and gay people. It’s a mix, but the
prices have gone low, and people
who didn’t have enough money to
buy property in the city center started
buying there. So the neighborhood
has this tension of people who want to
live a more bourgeois life, but they’re
in the middle of the neighborhood
with people who don’t have rights,
who are immigrants, who don’t know
if tomorrow the government will kick
them out. People from all over the
world. But it’s become a haven for
investors and the neighborhood is in
the middle of being gentrified and
changed. So it’s a very interesting setting to
live in and to make a film in. It’s very
dense. It’s one of the less homogenic
and more diverse areas in Israel.

Israel prides itself on the diversity
of Jewish people coming from Arab
countries, coming from Europe. But
they’re all Jewish and they share a
common mentality and they’re all
citizens of Israel. Neve Sha’anan is
more diverse — it’s people from India,
China, Eritrea, Sudan, the Ivory Coast. I
feel it’s a missed opportunity by Israeli
society that instead of accepting these
people legally and into our society,
they are trying to hold back and fight
against it. It’s also very ironic that
Israel is becoming a state that aspires
to have a government like this. It’s
mind-boggling. It’s like, we learned
nothing from history and our own
history. It’s like people don’t want to
connect dots. They just want to see the
cruel history that they experienced as
the Jewish people and feel like it was
something personal that happened to
them, and like they cannot be the
victimizers at all.

You’ve said that this film is
very much about the idea of
who’s the victim and who’s the
victimizer. When you raise yourself and your
children on the narrative of being
a victim and perpetuating historical
trauma, it’s very hard to notice other
people’s traumas, and the fact that
you are creating traumas for other
people. Because you’re constantly in
trauma and you’re always dealing with
your own trauma and you’re always
the victim and you’re the center of the
world, but you are not the center of
the world. I think it should change. But
no one cares what I think! Sometimes I
don’t care about what I think.

What was the casting process like?
The casting process was through
meeting people and going to plays. [I
turned to] the Holot theater company
to cast the Eritrean community in Israel.

It was cast mainly by meeting actors
from the group, having conversations
arts & culture
with them. Basically they wanted to
participate in the film and I was very
lucky about that. They’re a group that
used to be based in Holot outside of a
temporary incarceration open prison
for immigrants who don’t have permits
to stay in Israel. They put them in an
open prison in the desert close to the
Negev. There’s an interesting scene
between the French-Jewish
woman (played by Flora Bloch)
who is trying to move to Israel
and Ben that I thought was a
very revealing moment about
the ways that Jewishness is
expressed when Jews are
a minority in the country
versus when they are the
majority in the country. The
French woman is concerned
by France’s antisemitism
and wants to move to Israel,
while Ben is tortured by the
complexities of living as
a privileged Jewish Israeli
person. Can you say something
about what that scene meant
to you?
One of the things I’m proud about
this film is that I feel like it deals with
subjects which are not easy subjects
to address. But I think we managed to
create a balance between comedy and
drama that I’m very proud of. I think it
allows the film to be self explanatory.

It can reveal its deep themes and
make you think, in an entertaining
way. Again, it’s about irony. It’s about
hypocrisy. It’s about human nature.

Knowing how to experience your own
point of view, and being unable to be
in another person’s point of view. It’s
human nature, and it’s ever-fascinating
to me.

And it also happens to me a lot of
times with the fact that I can be in
my own shoes and identify my own
narrative so much but it’s hard for me
to even experience a person who is
experiencing the same thing as me
but in a different language in different
settings. But the resemblance is there
so it’s very ironic. And I think that
scene is about that. ■
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