Assaf Gruber’s Miraculous Accident provides us with what we might wish to distinguish as one of the first contemporary Jewish anti-Zionist fiction projects. With this, it must be determined that this is not a work speaking explicitly against the Palestinian genocide, but a project whose imagination of Jewish identity exists in contest to the homogenizing monolith that Zionism has sought to normalize across the Jewish diaspora and allied governments. Gruber, in this plight of counter-narrativization, positions us across history, within the relationship of two students and their editing professor. The film’s protagonist is Nadir (played by the character’s inspiration, artist Abdelkader Lagtaâ), a Moroccan filmmaker sent to Soviet-Poland under the auspices of a Communist education into cinematic formalism, where he begins his relationship with the Jewish professor, Edyta, and develops a close friendship with her protégé, Jarek. This short work is mostly an account on Nadir’s reflections as he returns to the Lodz Film School in 2024 and considers his brief time there, back in 1968. This return is prompted by a newfound letter, written to him by Edyta, who reluctantly migrated to Israel when she felt at risk in a post-’67 political landscape. In the midst of all these spectral dynamics, the revisitation of ghosts in the shadow of their political consequences, Gruber offers a kind of disembowelment of Jewish positionality, where what is organized as a pointedly negative image of a Jew (and Israel) then becomes supplanted by an infatuation, a specter of desire lost in a similar fashion to how Israel’s own policies and ideological designs have supplanted the very individuals and cultures that have amassed there across the decades, whether by choice or under duress.
Across the length of Lagtaâ’s voiceover — reading the letter with a melancholic twang — the textures of our characters are evoked, their obfuscated histories and interiorities unfurled across a narration which emphasizes the totally divorced contexts these reuniting phantoms were forced to shamble through. What roundabout occurs across this reading is the reference of sustained, looming state power, a force whose momentum separated these lovers, altering the trajectory of their story completely. This total conceit, in collaboration with the utility of Lodz’s student films from the late ‘60s, forms a montage that seeks to center the mundane tragedy of lost love, contextualizing it within the ongoing discourse of pronounced Palestinian existence across the Eastern Bloc through the early expansionism of Israel. If anything, politically, the project is a document of anti-Zionist history caught in the flummox of an ideological war that stretches over our world. Its victims, as denoted here, are of course those at the whims of these political projects — ultimately, every individual whose counter-hegemonic ideals become something they’re willing to fight for — but also a history of existence whose dynamics become reified into the larger abstraction of a battling global polarity: lost images, lost souls, lost loves, and lost wars. To create the new world, one which this film seems unsure of how to approach, that old one must be found, discerned, and reckoned with. The final image here, of soldiers flying back up into a plane, parachutes receding back into their pouches, unsteadily gestures to this kind of analysis, but the project’s misguided romanticism spurs on a flailing sense of intention, one seeped in a nostalgia that cannot be placed.
Published as part of FIDMarseille 2025 — Dispatch 3.
Comments are closed.