Red Star (2021)

Red Star is a unique experiment in genre — it is rarely that we see films on Jewish themes being mockumentaries, or fake documentaries. Fake here doesn’t mean false, rather than the supposedly actual events that we see aren’t real after all, which creates the comedic effect. The best examples of how the genre works include Woody Allen’s Zelig or Marty DiBergi’s This Is Spinal Tap. Essentially, Red Star shows the events that could have happened in reality — but didn’t. Now it’s important to keep track. The Argentinian director Gabriel Lichtmann plays the documentary filmmaker Héctor Díaz, who, in turn, is making a film about the spy Laila Salama, also known as the Red Star. The daughter of the MI-6 employee and a beauty pageants winner, it was she who took part in the Mossad’s kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann, a high-ranking Nazi official responsible for the Final Solution to the Jewish Question. Later she became a model wife and mother; a film was made about Laila and tango was named after her as well — and then all the threads leading to her get lost, and Díaz sets out to untangle them. What he discovers is a story of the Argentinian Jewry, which itself seems to hide in the shadow of the days.