Born in 1956, Tel Aviv. Lives in Tel Aviv.

The documentary film Z32 (2008) by Avi Mograbi brings to the fore the suppressed background of systemic violence and the means of its individual execution, asking what its personal and collective consequences are. The film is named after the action in which Palestinian policemen were killed in retaliation for the murder of several Israeli soldiers. The main character of Z32 is a young man, a former member of an elite Israeli military unit who participated in the action. The core of the film revolves around the protagonist's confession in which the issue of personal and collective guilt and a desire for forgiveness is entangled with reminiscence of violence, all the more unbearable for being interwoven with a certain sense of enjoyment.
Mograbi often appears in his own films, questioning the ambivalence of his own role and position and his ethical involvement with the social and political reality depicted in his films. In Z32 he takes this Brechtian effect a step further, singing the commentary with an orchestra in his living room. Throughout the film, digital masks cover the faces of the two main protagonists, the soldier and his girlfriend. By abandoning the facial expressions of the protagonists, who in documentary films provide a degree of authenticity and the possibility of empathy, Z32 becomes not only a film about the incriminated Other, but also a radical dissolution of the idea of 'the witnessing camera'.