Lanzmann’s first film feels more courageous and urgent than ever. For a documentary that seems to boast in its very title that it will be about EVERYTHING he manages to generalize NOTHING. Like a magic trick it feels uniquely personal yet leaves not a trace of autobiography. Keep an ear out for the haunting Sarah Gorby lamentations. — Jake Paltrow

Pourquoi Israel retraces, without propaganda or Manichaeism, but with empathy, depth, intelligence, humor and humanity, the accomplishments and contradictions of the Israeli nation in the process of being forged. The central question, which runs through the entire film, is that of normality and abnormality. Through a whole series of often hilarious scenes, Claude Lanzmann shows that in the astonished and sometimes dazzled eyes of the Jews of the diaspora, the normality of a “State like any other” is abnormality itself.

In English, German, and Hebrew with French subtitles