Confronting mature concepts early on in life can be critical to the development of a person and their ability to understand how the world works. Yet being introduced to something beyond their comprehension level, or which stands at odds with the way they comport themselves, can also make for a disjointed and, in some cases, purely negative experience. Delegation looks at how three teenagers going through their own high school ups and downs confront something much bigger than themselves and wrestle with how to internalize the lessons they’re meant to receive.
Nitzan (Naomi Harari), Frisch (Yoav Bavly), and Ido (Leib Levin) are classmates from Israel on a school trip to Poland to visit concentration camps and Jewish heritage sites from before the Holocaust. Their days are intense and full of emotional testimony, including from Frisch’s grandfather, himself a Holocaust survivor, but when they’re back at the hotel, it’s as if they’re on any other trip, still trying to discover plenty about how they function in social circles and deciding whether or not to act on complicated feelings of attraction.
There’s a lot embedded within this film, which comes from writer-director Asaf Saban, returning to the world of features after his first narrative film Outdoors was released in Israel in 2017 and toured the international festival circuit the following year. What audiences get out of watching this film will depend largely on what they’re willing to take away, very similar to how these teenagers have the opportunity to experience something life-changing but may not be willing to immerse themselves in the magnitude of what they’re seeing. Delegation explores many themes, some of which are contradictory and some of which are merely true-to-life, capturing the way in which multiple things can be true at once.
Any film produced by and featuring stories of Israelis seems destined for controversy at the moment due to the ongoing and worsening Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This film doesn’t address that but does examine a number of factors, like how its protagonists will soon join the Israeli army, which begs the question of their maturity level and ability to be thrust into life-or-death situations on a regular basis at such a young age. It also demonstrates how just being Israeli is enough of a reason to be a target, with the group being told that, while they can walk around the concentration camps wearing sweatshirts featuring the Star of David, for security purposes they must be very careful not to have any clothing or jewelry that might reveal they are Jewish when they have free time to explore Polish cities.
This is a film about bearing witness and trying to begin to grasp how circumstances can shape people in incredible ways. These teenagers are hearing about people their own age who were forcibly taken from their own homes and brought to a place where their only choices could have been to work or die, and they’re still preoccupied with far more materialistic matters that don’t seem anywhere near as important when put side-by-side. There is still emotion that reaches all three of them and hits them at different moments, and those glimpses of true transformation, however fleeting they may be, are indeed compelling.
This film is anchored by three impressive young actors at the beginning of their careers, and Harari, in her first film role, delivers a particularly searing performance, revealing much about how Nitzan sees herself and how she responds when that self-perception is challenged by people and places around her. Delegation is a thought-provoking film that poses many questions and doesn’t pretend that its characters are the ones best suited to answer them, instead watching without judgment to see how real people who have only lived so much act when forced to consider the world beyond just themselves.
Movie Rating: 8/10
