In 1918, while living in exile in Tiberias, Boris Schatz, (a Lithuanian Jewish artist and sculptor who settled in Palestine, founded the Bezalel School in Jerusalem and became known as the “father of Israeli art,”) wrote the novel Jerusalem Rebuilt: A Daydream. In the novel he outlines the land of Israel and Jerusalem in particular, from a standpoint of a utopian vision – political, economic and social vision – that is to take place a hundred years later, in the year 2018. Schatz describes a green city filled with gardens, whose citizens put great effort in cultivating their environment. The city is managed in the spirit of socialist-communist ideology by cooperatives whose members are farmers, industry workers and artists, all collaboratively working as they maintain their physical and mental health.
An Other Day is a film that borrows its inspiration from Boris Schatz’s vision and infuses it with a visual interpretation based in manipulations of formal elements of cinema and television vocabulary. In this film, Shai Dror – born and raised in Jerusalem – offers an alternative to life in this charged and complex city in the day after signing a peace agreement, or, alternatively – after a global war erupted. The movie refers to utopian and dystopian artworks and in this context one cannot ignore its relationship to more contemporary titles like The Handmaid’s Tale or The Prisoner, as well as others, that delve into the dark side of totalitarian regimes and societies failed attempts to form a new social order.