Interview with the Director of Oscar-Nominated Short: "Butcher's Stain"

This year's Academy Awards is going to be an especially contentious competition, but this does not only apply to the nominated features. The 98th Oscars has quite the list of nominees in their Best Live Action Short category, namely Jane Austen's Period Drama, The Singers, and Meyer Levinson-Blount's Butcher's Stain, which tells the story of an Arab man in Israel who is falsely accused of removing hostage posters, causing him to fight for his career and proclaim his innocence. This week we were fortunate enough to speak with Levinson-Blount about this visceral, politically charged short that might just take home Oscar gold next month.

Eric: "I am here with Meyer Levinson-Blount, the director of Butcher’s Stain, one of the Oscar-Nominated Shorts this year. Thank you so much for taking the time to sit down and talk with me today. The film is wonderful, congratulations!"

Levinson-Blount: "Thank you."

Eric: "I'd like to start by talking to you about the lived experience surrounding this film. It’s very, very specific, and there’s a lot of authenticity behind all of the characters. So I was wondering if you could talk a bit about how your own lived experience influenced the idea. I saw an interview with you where you talked about working at a supermarket post-October 7th, and that being a major influence for you. So if there’s anything else you’d like to add, or speak on I’d love to hear."

Levinson-Blount: "Yeah, absolutely. I worked at a supermarket after October the 7th because there was no school, a lot of workplaces were closed, and I really needed something to do. It was kind of like Coronavirus; everybody was trapped indoors. I went to work at a supermarket in my area, and the supermarket is a very interesting place because it’s sort of this microcosm in Israeli society. It’s a place where people go to work when there’s no job, they’ve gone bankrupt, addicted to drugs, or they’ve been in jail. It’s really a place where low-income people go to work, and people of all types of backgrounds are employed there. One of the things I noticed after the 7th of October was the tension between the Jewish workers and the Arab workers in the supermarket. And I thought of it as a smaller version of Israeli society itself, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I really wanted to capture that complex time where on one hand, you have the traumatic events of the 7th of October, everyone was feeling the collective trauma of those events. But on the other hand, there was a finger pointed to the Palestinians within Israel. There was a lot of unfair racism and discrimination that I witnessed and I sort of wanted to talk about how collective trauma affects people and how national crises affect people, but it also doesn’t justify racism and discrimination of a certain group of people."

Eric: "I was really compelled by your choice to cast yourself in the film as the perpetrator. I was curious about your process stepping into those shoes and trying to find this character’s justification for why he feels the way that he does about Samir, and why he chooses to make these accusations. Obviously, it’s revealed by the end of the film that the posters are falling off the wall, and in his mind he’s convinced that Samir is the one doing it even though it isn’t."

Levinson-Blount: "Yeah, well I think that a lot of the time people talk about how films change the world. I feel like, as filmmakers, we can create dialogue, and that’s what this film is trying to do. But I didn’t want to make a film about racism and discrimination and act like I’ve cleansed myself entirely of any sense of responsibility for activism. And so really what I was trying to say was that I’m a part of that society, and also as anyone in a society that’s broken, I’m also enabling. I think that I really wanted to show that I was a part of it, and I wasn’t making a film about racism and discrimination to cleanse myself of responsibility to go out and protest, or vote, or anything that any citizen should do to stand up for what they believe in."

Eric: "I was wondering if you could talk a bit about the compounding effects that discrimination like this has on people, especially when tensions are so high in a conflict. As we see in the film, this conflict he’s having with his coworker is not the only thing going on in his life. His ex-partner isn’t letting him see his son, her new partner is giving him gifts Samir doesn’t approve of, and it seems like everywhere he goes he can’t escape the dismissiveness. And so I was wondering if you could also speak on the strength through unity as you’ve mentioned before."

Levinson-Blount: "Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the point of this film is to not be provocative, or make people angry, it’s really about starting a dialogue. At times of national crisis and collective trauma, people tend to be silent about a lot of different things because they feel like it’s not the time to talk about them. But, that kind of mentality goes on for a very long time because people become afraid to speak about certain things. This film was supposed to open up that conversation, to break the ice. The only way to heal is to talk about things. To speak about why I put Samir’s personal life into the film: essentially what I was trying to say was that of course this racism and discrimination has an effect on his personal life, but also, that’s the point. The point is his personal life, it’s who he is as a person, it’s his family, it’s him, and the point is to focus on that part of this story. It’s not about the big picture, it’s about the small picture in my opinion. It’s about the one individual who is going through this, not an entire political mess, or whatever is going on in the world. It’s about the one person who is subjected to this behavior and this mistreatment. Focusing on that can make us have a connection to this issue in a more humane way. Not this big picture, policy thing that for individuals, at least for me, is a very frustrating experience. 

Eric: "That’s interesting. I see that a lot in the ways Samir chooses to act in these instances. When he gets angry, and he’s holding the knife it feels like he really needs to check himself. And it also seems like he’s the only one who has that self-restraint. I was really moved by his decision to not tell the coworkers that it was the fan because it feels to him like it’s not going to make a difference if they know. I don’t mean to ask you to get speculative, because obviously, the ambiguity is very important to the film, but I’m curious in your mind if there ever would be something that would have changed their minds, or if he had said something, would they have felt any differently?"

Levinson-Blount: "I think that the way that I’ve seen things, not just in Israel but worldwide is that a lot of beliefs and discrimination are very deep in our conscience. It’s not gonna take one news story, or one act of violence to change people’s opinions. People’s opinions are very integrated into their emotions and the way that they think about the world. And so that’s what Samir realizes by the end. He realizes that he can try and say that the air conditioner is doing it, but when he looks into the faces of the people who have been accusing him of this, he sees in their eyes that it’s still deeply implemented into the way that they feel about him. So what I was trying to say is that change is not that easy. Change is a very slow thing, it’s something that you have to have a lot of patience for. It doesn’t happen when you plan it to, you can’t just argue your way towards change, it’s something that society needs to go through and is very complicated. For me, as a writer/director, I don’t have a solution, I don’t know how society can get rid of those beliefs that are so implemented into the way that they think. But I will say at the end, Samir is looking into the camera as it’s pulling back, and that was my way of having Samir say to the audience 'I’ve done everything I can. Now it’s your turn.' I’ve been silent, I tried proving my innocence silently, and when that didn’t work, I confronted and stood up for myself, and that didn’t work, now it’s your turn. People from Israel, or worldwide, to stand up for what we believe in, and push for change, and have respectful dialogue, and be adults to bring serious and patient change to society."

Eric: "I’m really glad you brought that up, that leads me into my final question which was about the cinematography. The cinematography is very tight, even when you’re shooting in a medium wide, the depth of field is still really narrow, and there’s a lot of handheld in these moments. But in the final moments you chose to dolly away, and you still get to see the hostage posters in the sides of the frames, even though your focus is on Samir as he stares down the lens. So I was curious about your crafting of that symbolism, and how the cinematography of the rest of the film influenced that choice and what made you choose to be, for lack of a better term, 'neater' about how those final moments were presented."

Levinson-Blount: "That’s a great question. The film itself had a very closed cinematic language, it was supposed to feel suffocating. For me, after the events of October 7th, it felt like everyone was not getting enough oxygen, everyone was shutting up, no one was talking, and it was horrible. I felt like Samir’s character feels like everyone is closing in on him. So that’s why a lot of the shots are close ups, or POVs, and everything feels like it's really narrow. At the end, I think what opens up that shot, and why I break the language and I have this camera movement that’s smooth was to say, now that he’s gone through all of this, and he’s tried everything, I think that it opens up a place for change. It’s like society keeps on closing in and it closes in so much that everything just is able to open up again. I think that out of times that are hard and are traumatic, come times where we can implement change that is practical, that we learn lessons from. As a worldwide society, we’re going through a lot of extremism all around the world. We’re all very frustrated from it, and we don’t know why it’s the way that it is. But, I really do believe that after this period of time, we’ll be able to learn lessons about living in harmony with each other, having respectful conversations, and develop as a worldwide society. 

Eric: "Well, that’s a great answer, and on that note, I just want to say congratulations one more time on the film. Thank you again for taking the time."

We would like to thank Mr. Levinson-Blount once again for appearing on our publication and using his artistic voice for good during these contentious times. We wish him the best of luck at next month's Oscars ceremony. Thank you for tuning into Cinemasters.net and remember to never stop watching!