SHOSHANA DESCRIBES A TURNING POINT IN ISRAEL’S DEVELOPMENT
For several minutes, titles explain the historical background of the founding of the state of Israel. Much of the film is about life during the 1930s in Tel Aviv, a city carved out by Jewish refugees, featuring lavish restaurants and entertainment soirees, as major events unravel under the British Palestinian mandate of the League of Nations. (Filming is in Puglia, Italy.) That a British Jew is in charge of the mandate evidently provides comfort as more Jews are admitted to Palestine, beginning to learn Hebrew.
Shoshana Borochov (played by Irina Starshenbaum) is presented as a conscientious journalist for a Hebrew newspaper who wants the British mandate over Palestine to end with Arabs and Israelis living together in peace. She is a socialist, daughter of a Russian Zionist, who obtains information from Tom Wilton (Douglas Booth), a British police constable, with whom she has fallen in love. She is member of Haganah, a Zionist group seeking statehood through nonviolence. She opposes the Irgun, a radical Zionist organization that is active in terrifying Arabs through assassination and bombing, though she infiltrates to learn the group’s agenda. Caught in the middle of this terrorism are the British police and military, including government representative Robert Chambers (Ian Hart) and newly appointed counter-terrorism officer Geoffry Morton (Harry Melling), who works with Tom Wilkin to eliminate the Irgun, especially Avraham Stern (Aury Alby), who quite early in the film dresses as an Arab, takes a bomb to an Arabic part of town, and we see the resulting massive destruction. Many bombs thereafter punctuate the film.
A critical incident occurs when Shlomo Ben Yusef (Gal Mizrav) tries to bomb a bus jammed with Arab passengers. British police arrest Ben Yusef, torture him to get more information without success, and decide to execute him to make a statement that they hope will stop pro-Zionist terrorism. Shoshana, however, warns Chambers that the execution will ignite more terrorism by creating a martyr. Next, the British seek to locate Stern, and the search reveals how the Jewish public increasingly sides with extremist terrorists and against British efforts to constrain terrorism.
Director Michael Winterbottom ends the film by noting how the United Nations outlined Palestine with an area for Jews separated from an area for Arabs, though the state of Israel emerged with no similar state for the Arabs. Titles point out that Stern is still revered in Israel, a subtle way of linking events and ideologies portrayed in the film with the current tragedy in Gaza.
The Political Film Society has nominated Shoshana as best film in regard to human rights and peace as well as best film exposé of 2025. MH