REVIEW: DVD Release: Kippur

Film: Kippur
Release date: 22nd February 2010
Certificate: 15
Running time: 116 mins
Director: Amos Gitai
Starring: Tomer Russo, Liron Levo, Uri Klauzner
Genre: War
Studio: Optimum
Format: DVD
Country: Israel/France

Kippur goes the unlikely route of producing a war film without any of the fighting - Amos Gitai creating a movie that focuses on the humanitarian aspect, and the inner and outer hell faced by the soldiers.

Set during the Yom Kippur War of the 1970s, when Egypt and Syria attacked the Sinai and Golan Heights regions of Israel, Kippur is director Amos Gitai's retelling of a war he experienced firsthand. Assisting in this retelling are Liron Levo and Tomer Ruso, as the two main characters: Sgt. Weinraub and Lt. Ruso - two reservists who have lost their unit and end up assisting a helicopter rescue team. The story centres around the exploits (or lack thereof) of these men as they guide their team (also consisting of a doctor played by Uri Klauzner) from the relative safety of Yoran Hattab's helicopter to scenes of destruction on the frontlines of war.

Along with dialogue, plot and exposition are things Gitai considered surplus to what he wanted to achieve with Kippur. The film's quality is in its stark atmosphere, in the parts where Gitai clearly attempted to establish a similar dynamic to Vietnam movies like Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket. There is a genius in having your protagonists do almost nothing in a film while still managing to make this nothingness seem scary, against the backdrop of a war. Therefore, even though the enemy remain unseen throughout the entire movie (and only two shots are visibly fired on screen over the whole running time), the fact that there is a war on is inescapable. You won’t get a cavalry charge, but you will get the impending sense of danger…


What really strikes you about Kippur is the effort that went into surrounding the main characters with an insular web of equal parts desperation, disorganisation and futility. The whole situation in which they find themselves seems totally untenable, unwinnable and frankly pointless, despite the fact that who is actually winning the war is never mentioned. This is not the sort of film where the heroes come home to a fanfare of trumpets and a sea of fluttering flags. Hell, this isn't even the sort of film where they come home to their families and are forgotten about by the rest of the world. The one character who has anything to return to is Sgt. Weinraub, who enjoys a beautiful, unique, if rather pointless love scene that takes up the first nine minutes – thought, it establishes at least a human link.

There are scenes in Kippur that are hard to watch: four men heaving an injured soldier around a field so muddy that they can barely move, breaking the stretcher, dropping him numerous times, panting, heaving, struggling…this is hard to deal with. It is at times like this when the scale of Gitai's achievement with Kippur, and the message imbued within it become clear: you don't need to be killing people to see war in all of its bleakness. However, underneath it all, there is an incredibly black sense of humour – poking fun at the futility of war. It is, to my mind, the most powerful (and simultaneously the most horrible) scene in the entire film, as it on one hand shows what war is actually like before Hollywood fills it with explosions, and on the other shows that Gitai's 'real war' as being pretty terrible even without them.

However, a film with scenes that are hard to watch runs the risk of also being a film that drags, and Kippur occasionally falls foul of this. The acting is solid, but with so little attention paid to dialogue, or any real characterisation, the responsibility for driving the film onwards when nothing is really happening (note: this occurs a lot) falls to the film's unique dynamic. This works most of the time, but relying on a sense of minimalism and banal terror to progress your movie is always a risky business, and Kippur does not always manage to remain stimulating. That said, the vibe that it establishes – part Easy Rider, part 'Nam movie – is consistent, foreboding and scarily effective, so much so that it would be unfair not to stress the film's success in this regard once more.


Kippur is nothing if not an ambitious movie. Fortunately for fans of war films this is just the beginning of what Amos Gitai's hugely watchable work offers, but be warned, if you're after Bruckheimer-esque explosions then look elsewhere: Kippur is a movie that focuses on what war does to the heart and the head, not the body. JD