by Douglas Messerli
Chen Shahuda (screenwriter and director) גנטיקה (Genetica) / 2022 [15 minutes]
Israeli director Chen Shahuda’s short work Genetica is a
fascinating beginning of a film without an ending.
A conservative father (Udi Razzin) is determined that his son become a
competitive swimmer, forcing him each morning to participate in coached lessons
at a pool and demanding he maintain a swimmer’s diet. But his son, Hemi (Omri
Ilan), unbeknownst to anyone—including himself perhaps—is a sort of Israeli
Billy Elliot, who has just gotta dance. Hemi can barely last out his morning
swim, complaining to the coach of dizziness, as he rushes off to the local
fitness center which, apparently, provides this seeming outpost with dancing
lessons.
That night, while his parents make love, Hemi sneaks into the closet and
steals money from a packet where he knows his father hides cash. And the next
day he returns to the dancing studio, paying for lessons.
Upon a call from the studio, the
father shows up to the studio furious, pulling his son out of the institution
as if it were a bordello, a slapping him hard across the face for his robbery.
In this film’s last scene, we
observe Hami returning to the pool, obviously upon his father’s command. There
two fellow swimmers make fun of him for his attempt to take dancing lessons,
describing him as a “homo,” and within minutes Hemi has thrown one of them into
the pool, wrestling with him as if he intends to drown him on the spot.
We can guess what might
happen, that finally Hemi will be forced to leave home. But how he’ll survive,
how he might return to his dancing lessons and Dani is unexplained and
seemingly out of reach for someone who has grown up in a conservative Jewish
household and has no source of income. Who might even hire him in a town where
he’s already described as a “homo?”
One might describe Shauda’s
film as a work that begins to identify a young gay man, without really
establishing his sexuality, how he came to his desires to dance, or where he
might turn to live out those desires. This work of cinema reads like a prequel
to a film we might wish to see wherein the young hero struggles to deal with the
sudden and rather inexplicable desires that Shahuda has almost pasted upon his
character as if he were a paper doll to be dressed up in various identities based
on the creator’s (in this case the writer’s) whims.
By the credits we still have
very little of a character and no apparent way out of the stasis into which the
filmmaker tossed him.
Los Angeles, August 13, 2025
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).
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