page_title: Ram Loevy
section_title: Three television dramas
hierarchical_section_title: Ram Loevy / Three television dramas
caption_attribution_description: IBA (Israel_Broadcasting_Authority) head office
context_page_description: Ram Loevy is an Israeli television director and screenwriter. He has written and directed and documentary films that challenge the status quo on such issues as class conflict, torture, the prison system, and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. In 1993, Loevy was awarded the Israel Prize in Communication, Radio and Television in 1993 for his life's work.
  Loevy is Professor Emeritus of Cinema and Television at Tel Aviv University.
context_section_description: Shortly before Letters in the Wind, Loevy directed a miniseries, Policeman (2000), based on a script by Galia Oz and Ofer Mashiach. In 1997, Loevy approached Moti Kirschenbaum with plans to direct a miniseries about a murder that took place in a fictional television station, Channel 66. Kirschenbaum approved of the project, but the following year Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided to replace Kirschenbaum with Uri Porat. Porat had previously served as Director-General of the Israel Broadcasting Authority from 1984 to 1989, and was Director-General when Loevy produced Bread. Porat, however, was also closely aligned with the rightwing of the Israeli political spectrum, and had even referred to one of Hanoch Levin's anti-militaristic early plays as "theatrash". The problem with Loevy's project, he claimed, was the plot and budgetary constraints.
  Loevy denies that the script for Murder in Television House (2001) was a critique of Israeli public television. He had enlisted Batya Gur, a popular writer of detective fiction, to tell the story of a murder that took place in Channel 66, a fictional commercial television station. Some critics, however, considered the story to be a settling of accounts with Channel 1. The film revolves around several plot axes, one of which is the story of a veteran director who wants to make a film about the story "Ido and Einam" by the Nobel laureate Shmuel Yosef Agnon, but has the project rejected by the petty authorities who manage the station. The director decides to make the film anyway, but his girlfriend, the set designer is soon murdered, initiating a chain of murders at the station. Two factors adding to the complexity of the story is the fact that the murdered woman is also the ex-wife of the director's close friend, the station's senior programming manager, and the Agnon story that he is filming is also a story about a love triangle.
  When he rejected the film, Porat reportedly said, "People will think that there really are murders taking place here. In fact, the film opens with the line, "All of the events described in this film are fictional—except for one", leading the audience to wonder which one it is. That is not, however, the only reference to real events in Israeli television. The Hebrew name of the film, רצח, מצלמים (Retzach, metzalmim, literally, "Murder, we're filming"), is a play on the name of a popular TV show, שקט, מצלמים (Sheket, metzalmim, or "Quiet, we're filming"), and among the subplots are a news story about striking workers (a continuation of the story Loevy began in Bread) (other news stories being covered throughout the film include tensions between religious and secular, men and women, the unemployed and the wealthy, Arabs and Jews, and new immigrants—the detective investigating the murders is a Russian immigrant, who once served in the KGB and the FBI).
  What makes the film most shocking, however, is the final discovery that the roots of the murder date back to an incident the Six Day War, when a group of Israeli soldiers massacred 52 Egyptian prisoners at Ras Sudar in the Sinai. Loevy later admitted that this was the one incident in the plot that was not fictional. It was based on an account he had heard from a participant in 1970, while he was serving in the reserves. He went on to report the incident to the military authorities and, in consequence, was removed from his unit. He had long wanted to make a film about the incident, but lacked the evidence to prove conclusively what had happened. Loevy later said:
  "When the Six Day War ended, everyone thought that the 'mother of all wars' was over and we won. I was terrified and thought to myself, 'What would happen to our prisoners there if this story gets out?' Nevertheless, I feel that we must not be silent.... People say that these things happen in wartime and that there is loyalty to the army and loyalty among the troops, which causes these things to disappear beneath the carpet. But I believe that we are betraying our real responsibility, which is to take these skeletons out of the closet, even if we thi
caption: The background for Murder in Television House was eerily reminiscent of life behind the scenes at Israel's Channel 1.
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