In Israel, military service isn’t just compulsory; it is a rite of passage for every young Israeli person. Through home videos and narration taken directly from the diaries of children who never returned from the two to three years they were required to spend training with the Israel Defense Forces, as well as footage of children at school in contemporary Israel, Guy Davidi’s Innocence [+lee también:
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Cineuropa: You left military service in Israel after three months, when you were 19. Did you always want to make a film about this?
Guy Davidi: When I came out of the military, I went to study in film school. I was so scarred that I felt like everything around me was like the military. The whole country felt like a wrong place, not a nourishing place. Not a place where the idea is, "You're a young person, let's help you out with your ambition to be something in this world; let's encourage you and support you." 

So when I was 21 or 22, I moved to France. Then, when I came back, it was in another position, with another perspective where I could deal more with what makes Israel the way it is. That drew me to Palestine, to the West Bank, to participating in demonstrations with Palestinians, and then to Five Broken Cameras [+lee también:
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I was very afraid to make a film like Innocence, about victims in Israel. But these victims are children. And I think it felt more right to do that film after I first acknowledged the Palestinian victims with Five Broken Cameras. Now, after clearing that and because I am constantly involved in that fight, I feel I'm allowed to also talk about some other victims - namely, the innocent children who are Israelis.

I initially imagined these children as helpless victims, who simply did as they were told. I didn't think that they might object to what they were asked to do. But as soon as the film begins, we understand that these are very thoughtful young people.
Being a child growing up in Israel is a journey. First, you get normalised to some ideas: that the military is a good thing, that it protects you, that it's an obligation. You learn to send gifts to the soldiers that are serving. You get accustomed to that, and that's all you need. You don't need hardcore propaganda.

That was my approach when I chose Zohar, the four-year-old child. I picked a kindergarten where the teacher was lovely, gently talking about things but not at all pushing a message. And then you have the other teacher, the one who makes the children paint soldiers. But that’s still a sneaky way. You don't get pushed that much, and it’s not daily; you just go on a few trips here and there, meet some hero soldiers. It sneaks up on you like that. Ella, on the other hand, the other child I film, is ten years old, so the propaganda becomes a harsher tool. She is directly told, "You're going to serve." It intensifies throughout the years. 

There's an aspect of the film that is very confrontational, with the footage and the narration. But there is also a poetic structure. How did you work that out?
I didn't start from a straightforward idea. I read Ron Adler's texts, and it is such beautiful poetry. He had this poem that really resonated with me, where he writes, “I dream of horses, I dream of you.” And I liked this escapist quality. For him, the horses that appear in the text had become the image of what it means to be free. I wanted to take that moment and be inspired by him, but also pay respect to him by bringing it into the film. That was my starting point. My starting point was not to film children in kindergarten and see how they’re educated. Those scenes were needed to understand who Ron was and why he wrote about horses, but I was not chasing after those scenes. Rather, I was trying to get to that moment where the audience could understand why an image of a horse outside, in nature, could make so much sense to a soldier.

Are you hoping this film might help create a debate? If not in Israel, then at least internationally?
In Israel, I hope to stretch out the debate, to maybe sharpen the sensitivity of parents a little, to make them a little bit more aware of their own limitations. It’s not going to be enough, but I think it's a beginning. I hope it can make people think about the way we think about the military and violence in general. When I was given a gun for the first time, I was shaking so much. And when I heard the guns firing, during training, it really hit me that I was holding something that was designed to kill a person. And I think this sensitivity, which I actually find to be very beautiful, is being crushed worldwide. By how we think about security, how we think about the military, how we think about the war in Ukraine. We have to think all the time that a person who is holding a gun is a person who is risking other people and who is a risk to themselves. Until we have cleansed the world of guns, we are in the shadow of that risk.