Sign from Heaven (1999)

A Sign from Heaven concerns three famous recent episodes of violence: Rabin's "assasination" by Igal Amir, Carmella Buhbut's "killing" of her husband Yehuda, and the "elimination" of the "Engineer" Yehiya Ayash by Israeli security forces. The film examines aspects of each of these episodes and exposes a surprising network of similarities connecting them. The manner in which an episode is presented as "murder", "killing" or "elimination", determines the distinction between these categories. How are photography, physical evidence, and reconstruction of the scene of the violent act used to justify, stigmatize, erase or memorialize a particular episode? The film goes beyond boundaries of documentary. Each of its 22 segments is part of a lexicon defining terms from A to Z including "ID card", "Peace", State", "Trauma" and "Violence". Aside from the narrators, all of the speakers in the film hold positions in various institutions related to the three episodes. A Sign from Heaven casts doubt upon familiar ideological formulas and shows the way in which different types of language - scientific, legal, liberal-democratic- further complicate the web of violence, giving it legitimacy in certain cases and blurring its origins in others.