WhiteDwarf
2015 · 6m · Israel
Directed by Avi Ben Zaken
Genres: documentary, essay film, musical
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A docu-musical in which multidisciplinary artist Avi Ben Zaken returns to the fragments of an unfinished album, recorded during a period of depression in which he abandoned music for photography. Against the backdrop of the Second Lebanon War's rocket attacks on Haifa and the Krayot, he sketches a year on the streets of Kiryat Yam as a portrait of a place colored in the hues of an aching soul.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Ben Zaken's doing the thing where personal trauma and geopolitical disaster blur into the same grayscale, which could be precious—except the unfinished album as structural skeleton keeps it from vanishing into navel-gazing, and that refusal to resolve either the songs or the war is genuinely unsettling.
A formally assured essay film that inherits from both the structural rigor of the musical documentary and the tradition of photography-based portraiture, where the Krayot becomes both subject and psychic mirror—the kind of work that justifies the form by understanding exactly what it can hold.
The decision to leave the album genuinely unfinished, rather than completing it for catharsis, is the move that makes this work: the songs fracture and trail off against the street photographs like a filmmaker choosing silence over resolution, and that discipline is what elevates the whole thing.