Michael Winterbottom’s political thriller Shoshana is inspired by real-life events. Starring Douglas Booth, Irina Starshenbaum, Harry Melling, Aury Alby, Ian Hart, the film is due for theatrical distribution by Vision on 27 June.
Shoshana - an Italy-United Kingdom coproduction, produced by Bartleby Film, Revolution Films with logistical support from Apulia Film Commission – is set in the 1930s in Tel Aviv, a new European-style city built on the shore of the Mediterranean during the British Mandate while the idea of the Israeli state is developing in the background.
1930s, Tel Aviv is a new European-style city built on the shore of the Mediterranean. Palestine is a British colony and the nation of Israel has not yet been established: the General Assembly of the United Nations would late vote to separate Arabs and Jews in Palestine, thereby dividing them into different states, only at the end of 1947.
Through the relationship between Thomas Wilkin (Douglas Booth) and Shoshana Borochov (Irina Starshenbaum), the film shows how violence and extremism divide people, forcing them to choose a side.
Wilkin, member of the anti-terrorism team of the British Palestine forces, is working with Geoffrey Morton (Harry Melling) to find a clandestine leader, the charismatic poet Avraham Stern (Aury Alby). Stern is certain that the creation of the state of Israel will only come about through violence and Wilkin and Morton become his key targets.
Shoshana is a modern, progressive feminist. She hates the politics of Stern and his followers but the intensifying climate of violence forces her to pick who she wants to fight with.
The film had a 15 year gestation and followed archive research in Israel by the director. Winterbottom identified a range of similarities between Puglia and 1930s Tel Aviv in the photographic and historical material he found.
“We shot in Puglia, Italy. We need to recreate Tel Aviv, built in 1924, so we needed lots of low, white buildings that could look about 15 years old. Tel Aviv today is enormous and filled with skyscrapers, we realised right away that we couldn’t shoot there. Of course, we couldn’t use the original Thirties buildings because now they are almost a century old, while Tel Aviv then was a new city- but we found very similar architecture in Puglia, with recently built houses. There were many Israeli actors on set and they were truly stunned by the similarity”.
Vintage Tel Aviv was created from: Ostuni (Melogna quarter and other), Brindisi (Casale quarter), the coastal areas of Pantanagianni (Carovigno) and Torre Canne (hamlet of Fasano).
The director used corners of Lecce for Jerusalem while Jaffa was created in Taranto.
The director worked on the set with production designer Sergio Tribastone, creating an ideal landscape as the setting for Israel: “the sea is the same, and the coastline is also very similar with hills, olive trees etc. There were many, many places we could work in Puglia.”