As is the case every year the upcoming Jewish International Film Festival (JIFF) will again be strong in the documentary category with a number of outstanding documentaries.

South African director Saxon Logan’s film SYLVIA : TRACING BLOOD is bound to  attract a lot of interest. Logan’s film  looks at the life and times of the late Sylvia Raphael, whom the Jerusalem Post described as Mossad’s legendary femme fatale.

The film has a  gob-smacking –  one can’t quite get one’s head around it – quality to it. Here was the story of a a beautiful young woman, who came from a good home, born in Cape Town, South Africa to an Afrikaner mother and a Jewish father, who was recruited by Mossad, taking over from Israeli spy Eli Cohen, following his public hanging in Damascus in My 1965, and became one of the their best and most cold and calculating spies, infiltrating the highest ranks within the Palestinian Liberation Office( (PLO). She worked for Mossad under the alias of Patricia Roxborough and assumed the role of international press photographer so that she could get easy access across borders.

Logan’s film is well researched, trying to come up with as complete a picture as possible. Many people are interviewed including her brother, her husband, leading journalists she worked with, and high ranking Government officials, who are each asked to give their impressions of her, with some not knowing her true identity,

A fascinating film. For me it brought up memories of one of Shakespeare’s most famous characters, Lady Macbeth and her famous ‘unsex me now’ speech at the height of her, and her husband’s dramas. How did Sylvia Raphael manage to ‘unsex herself’? How did she manage to remain so ice-cool when she was deep in the enemy’s territory and dealing with such dangerous characters?!

Like all the great documentaries, SLVIA : TRACING BLOOD raises a lot of questions and does not provide any simple answers.

JIFF will screen in Sydney between October 26 and November 23.

http://www.jiff.com.au