I think with a lot of filmmakers, their first film is their best film because they had to think on their feet and solve problems with ingenuity.
Israeli ingenuity was never more evident than in the Ayalon bullet factory built during the British occupation of Palestine. It was constructed underneath an urban kibbutz. The workers had a bakery and laundry which provided constant clatter to disguise the work carried on below ground.
The tantalizing discomfort of perplexity is what inspires otherwise ordinary men and women to extraordinary feats of ingenuity and creativity; nothing quite focuses the mind like dissonant details awaiting harmonious resolution.
We know that freedom has many dimensions. It is the right of the man who tills the land to own the land; the right of the workers to join together to seek better conditions of labor; the right of businessmen to use ingenuity and foresight to produce and distribute without arbitrary interference in a truly competitive economy.
Clearly the human story is one of acceleration. There has been a Moore curve in terms of the number of people alive on the planet, our technological ability, and our ability to understand ourselves. We have had this extraordinary, explosive growth in our ingenuity.
Anywhere the struggle is great, the level of ingenuity and inventiveness is high.
The Janus-like nature of innovation - its responsible use and so on - was evident at the very birth of human ingenuity, when humankind first discovered how to make fire on demand.
