User reviews

This is a different way to think about Israel and Palestine and to hear from people you haven't heard from. Ofra Bloch is a good interviewer and the people she interviews are not always happy with the questions she asks and she is not always happy with the answers. This is a brave personal movie. It's uncomfortable and thoughtful in a way few movies are these days.

Ofra Block a psychoanalyst and filmmaker powerfully engages in interviewing second generation Germans and Palestinians. She herself as interviewer- participant forced me as a member of the audience to confront past and current history and my own hard held beliefs and prejudices. She did this by showing what the act of truly listening to people who we look upon as enemies and who do not hold our personal views can be a gesture of taking responsibility. Her film raises many questions and does not attempt to give solutions. However what it does do is to put us on alert not to turn away from past history or our current political realities and to take heed and remember our humanity and that we are all in this together. It is also beautifully filmed and needs to be seen.

A compassionate exploration of global wounds and the role of deep listening as a tool for healing ourselves and others. We are transformed as we participate in a deeply personal journey of an experienced psychoanalyst and filmmaker who travels across the globe to witness the stories of people she was taught to hate and fear. She attempts to ask without judgment the hard questions that will help her better understand global Transgenerational Trauma. She begins a conversation that may move us toward the possibility of a world without the cultural, political and religious violence that has created a rend in our moral universe. In the process, the director becomes her own subject and learns a lesson that alters the way she sees forever.

If you are someone who likes to contemplate the complexity of human relations without looking for easy answers, this is the film for you. Ofra is a shining example of how to stay engaged with all sides of a traumatic situation so that each voice can be heard in its unique wisdom. She does not force interpretation, but allows the viewer to reach deep into themselves, in order to be touched by the various forms of suffering.

A hopeful vision of the transformative power of true presence, and authentic listening. This film is an excellent tool for teaching, and raising deep questions.

Afterward

As a post World War II German gentile, this documentary really speaks to me.

Ofra Bloch, the director, is an Israeli-born psychoanalyst/filmmaker who has been living in New York for many decades. She uses the movie to highlight and listen to the voice of the "Other", e.g. the very people she was taught to hate such as Germans and Palestinians. She examines the dialectic between victims and victimizers. Her interviews with second and third generation descendants of Nazi perpetrators and with contemporary Palestinians living under Israeli occupation are haunting.

Bloch puts herself repeatedly into the film. We follow her from Germany to Israel and to Palestine. She uses her own story as a narrative arc, employs her professional interview skills and probes her subjects' most intense emotional quandaries.

The opening scene shows Bloch as a child in Israel helping her great uncle who lost his family in a concentration camp carry home a block of ice for refrigeration. Was this image meant to show how people can react to trauma by freezing the memories and fossilizing the hatred it created? Further historical black and white footage alludes to the shadows of history we all carry.

The movie raises profound questions. What legacy did we inherit from our parents and grandparents and what legacy do we want to leave our children? Are people capable of learning from history or are we doomed to repeat the cycles of aggression, revenge and more aggression? Is forgiveness and peaceful co-existence after such intense chronic conflict possible?

Will listening to the voice of the "Other", meaning the victims of our aggression, recognizing their pain and mourning their losses move the needle towards reconciliation? Or, are all parties pawns in a larger geopolitical imperialist struggle for hegemony in the Middle East that no acts of human kindness and neighborly cooperation can ever hope to halt?

The title of the movie implies that there there is an Afterward. It is a deeply felt and timely must see documentary.

This film should be seen by everyone. It provides a deeply moving, sensitive, insightful and thought provoking understanding of current attitudes and historical antecedents to the current climate in Israel and Palestine. I grew up in a community that was deeply connected to Israel where many people traveled there and chose to live there as adults and spoke of Palestinians only with extreme derision. As an adult I learned that the full story was more complex than I had known.

This film portrays Israelis and Palestinians in their full humanity. Perhaps when people begin to reach across the historical divide and fully appreciate the humanness of their "enemies" a lasting peace may become possible.

Everyone should see this film!

Afterward is a moving and courageous film about Ofra Bloch's personal journey of processing her own trauma and confronting her role in indirectly traumatizing others. It challenges us all to think about how this applies to us personally and to our world order in general. It was moving, provocative, and beautifully done. It's an important film to see.

Through a series of conversations with the German children of Nazi officers, Palestinians, and her own reflections, Ofra / the filmmaker, examines her own past growing up in Israel, moving to the United States, and the ongoing inter-generational trauma experienced by all sides. This is a movie that haunts you with the questions, courage, and wisdom of all the speakers, by talking with each other honestly about their past, present, and possible future.

Taking a few stars off because the editing and perspectives lacked. To elaborate on perspectives, it didn't feel 100% complete. I think that we got a lot of Palestinian points of view but not Israelis. I'm aware that the filmmaker herself is Israeli but I still think we would've gained a lot more with a balanced number of Israeli citizens being interviewed. She as one person doesn't represent several Israelis. Overall, though, this film achieved its main goal to say that we're all human and we all deserve peace - there must be another way. The Israeli filmmaker and the Palestinian interviewees spoke in a respectable way while also latently addressing slight tensions. It also used visuals in proper ways, showing what it needed without overstimulating, and I liked how it wasn't overly chopped in the interview bits, so we could really see the microexpressions and body language.

Bloch's even-handed approach to the fraught history between the Germans and the Jews and the Palestinians and the Israelis, plus her honesty about her own prejudices, contribute to the success of this film both as documentary and personal history. Highly recommended.

The film documents a personal journey to address a long standing hatred and fear of Germans that takes the narrator from childhood walks with her uncle, to Israel face to face with Palestinians discussing the occupation. Through a dozen or more interviews Ofra discusses her own past growing up in Israel, examines the trauma wounding both sides, and asks what our responsibility and complicity is now. These are not questions answered by the film; the audience is allowed to see each person in their full humanity and to try to answer for themselves as she traces the decisions she and her family have made along the way. A very powerful and compelling story that has stayed with me for days after seeing this moving film.

Filmmaker-psychoanalyst Ofra Bloch embraces the universal urgency of the cry "Never Again". She extends this call for collective recognition to victims of the Nazi Holocaust and to Palestinians whose humanity is being erased by the Israeli state. As we viewers accompany her journey to examine her hatred of the unknown other, we see her overcome her own fears. Honesty is the price. This is a hopeful film.

With remarkable insight, empathy and courage, Bloch brings a rare sensitivity to a painful and difficult subject - the Holocaust, the Nakba, and the Occupation - while offering a ray of hope for a path forward to mutual understand and reconciliation between opposing communities, each with their unique histories of trauma. A truly important, sensitive and inspiring film.

Ofra Block, has correctly named her documentary film "Afterward". The questions about the oversimplified beliefs I have held, were not only challenged during this documentary, but continue to be in my mind, long afterward. Ms. Block was born and raised in Israel among Holocaust survivors. the film documents her personal and physical journeys, to examine her life long prejudices, through of series of interviews and encounters with a number of remarkable Palestinians and Germans. These interviews and her ability to listen deeply enables the audience to hear and think about truths that may be different from ours. To consider how her identity and the identity of " The Other" were formed. She brings to our awareness the need to pay attention to and learn about the past, and alerts us to how it can repeat itself in the present. She does not preach, nor offer solutions, but ends with the feeling that maybe through listening we can make space in our minds for the thoughts and experiences of on another.

Ofra Bloch's full-length film "Afterward" is a beautifully realized study of her own search for self-knowledge as a Jewish Israeli, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, examining first her relationship with Germans and then her relationship with Palestinians. In-depth interviews display the power of genuine interactions in which both parties strive for honesty of expression and for authentic openness to the "other." The centrality of the Holocaust and the Nakba, and the relationship between these two devastations, are explored without sensationalism. This film should be viewed widely by young and old--not only those narrowly "affected" by these histories, but the global public. In an era of simple slogans and the politics of hate, this film stands out as a demand--one that Ofra Bloch makes first and foremost of herself--to confront the recognition of suffering and responsibility in all its complexity, sorrow, and necessity.

This heart-wrenching film by the psychoanalyst Ofra Bloch is about listening to those whose voices are rarely heard- the Palestinians. Ms. Bloch, an Israeli living in the U.S. for 40 years, begins her journey in Germany where she interviews second and third generation non-Jewish Germans whose family members lived through the Holocaust. She is concerned with the intergenerational transmission of trauma and the process of "othering." This leads her to reflect on her own birth country's treatment of its "other"- Palestinians. It is a moral and psychological reckoning for Bloch . She does not flinch from revealing her conscious and unconscious biases before the making of the film but the film is her confrontation with them. Through multiple interviews with Palestinian activists,, professors, artists and a psychiatrist her own ears open hearing, and ultimately empathizing with,the other. In doing so she provides us a beginning step in resolving this intractable conflict -through genuine dialogue hope is seeded.

This is a smart, thoughtful, nuanced, humane, and fearless documentary on a difficult and urgent topic. Bloch's skills as a psychoanalyst serve her well in lucidly raising thorny questions and welcoming unexpected answers. The back-and forth between Germany and Palestine and the shifting of her own status (oscillating between oppressed and oppressor) works beautifully. There is a lot of attention paid to detail, resulting in many memorable moments.