Taboo: Amos Guttman
Taboo: Amos Guttman
Taboo: Amos Guttman: The AIDS epidemic claimed countless lives. This number is two times the generational loss because older men were taken away from younger people who didn’t get to hear what they had to say and learn from them. It’s moving, then, that Taboo director Shauly Melamed was born in 1993 — the same year his subject, filmmaker Amos Guttman, died of AIDS-related complications. Obviously, Melamed never knew Guttman personally; still, one can see the influence of an elder filmmaker in this affecting portrait.
Taboo follows the brief but impactful career of Amos Guttman, who made Israel’s first openly LGBTQ+ film with 1983’s Drifting. The documentary chronicles how this single director managed to make such a big mark with just four feature films and a few shorts.
Nor does one need much prior exposure to Guttman’s work; Taboo contains ample footage from Drifting as well as subsequent features Bar 51 (1985), Himmo, King of Jerusalem (1988), and Amazing Grace (1992) — although Melamed keeps things chatty without talking through too many movies like a good cinephile might. You’ll want to seek out the films afterward.
Archival footage of Guttman considering his career adds depth to the film’s understanding of his work. It also helps illustrate that these movies really did spark conversation in a culture that remains behind on LGBTQ+ rights. In one observation included here, we learn that while Guttman was growing up, his father doted on him but skipped the premiere of Drifting.
Most revelatory is an interview conducted shortly before his death that went unpublished until now. Gaunt from AIDS’ wasting effects on the body, Guttman talks at length about what he does when making movies and how they affect people and what he hopes will happen when you force audiences into confronting their discomfort via boundary-pushing cinema. Shot by Guttman’s young assistant, Anat Dotan, this interview forms the spine of the film — and allows the filmmaker to come alive on his own terms.
Guttman’s voice (or something like it) also speaks extensively in voiceover. The words of Guttman’s unpublished writing are vocalized by an AI. The absence of other voices from his time underscores the loss he represents. A posthumous reflection drives home the significance of Drifting: In its original language, the title means “infection.” The work anticipates the affliction that would mark Guttman’s life and that of many contemporaries.
Born Sita Buzăului in Transylvania, Romania in 1954 before emigrating to Israel with his family at age seven, aspects of Guttman’s biography filter through both the film-within-a-film interview and the ghostly AI narration. Even though he made some of the most groundbreaking portrayals of gay experience ever committed to celluloid, Guttman expresses discomfort with certain aspects of queer life; he resists being labeled a “gay filmmaker,” preferring instead to be known as a filmmaker attracted to men.
Melamed paints him as a reluctant maverick thrust into the spotlight — one whose matinee-idol looks could’ve given any Hollywood A-lister a run for their money but who seemed to use each movie as another opportunity to feel out parts of himself and his relationship with sexuality alongside us. It was a journey.
Meanwhile, he says his goal was to deal with taboos about sexuality in general rather than only gay experiences. This can be seen in the long sequence about his second film Bar 51, which “Taboo: Amos Guttman” says answered a plea from Guttman’s father to stop putting so much gay stuff on screen. Instead of two men, it tells the story of a man who is unshakably sexually attracted to his sister.
“Taboo: Amos Guttman” shows how Guttman provocatively probed questions of desire across orientation; his own lover pops up in contemporary interviews as well, underscoring further the tender artist who carved out a unique space in cinema through his vulnerability.
The doc also unpacks what Melamed calls an implicit effort to comment on cultural divides — relationships between Arab and Jewish men in Guttman’s films evoke the cultural divisions and tensions between Israel and Palestine — but more overtly explores how he used different laws of desire to offer shared humanity between characters across divides. For a filmmaker who didn’t consider himself political, the film finds some shrewd readings.
The movie isn’t all flattery. “Taboo: Amos Guttman” notes how brutal Himmo was treated by critics and avoided by audiences; Melamed uses their perspectives to build a case that Guttman was still finding himself as an artist, and knew that his strongest film had yet been made. But even considering he had such a small catalogue, the movie makes a case that he should be remembered alongside names like Fassbinder, Jarman or Almodóvar whose work echoes through many of these images.
When we get to “Amazing Grace,” released just before his death and Taboo positions as Guttman’s creative rebound after Himmo, we see that he’d found it: Amazing Grace may not have Drifting’s “first” moniker attached to it (though time generally has positioned it as Guttman’s best work, in part because it was the last), but he knew by then that this would be his final film. And perhaps the highest praise for any mentor is to sit with their work so long you end up outliving them.
Watch free movies like on Fmovies
- Genre: Documentary
- Country: United States
- Director: Shauly Melamed
- Cast: Amos Guttman
