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Date: Fri, 05 Aug 2005 04:46:38 +0530 Tracking the trippers from Gaza to Goa By TALYA HALKIN For documentary filmmaker Yoav Shamir, the distance between the sand dunes of Gaza and the beaches of Goa is not as great as it seems. Checkpoint, an award-winning documentary that Shamir completed in 2004, captured the day-to-day reality of interactions between Israeli soldiers and Palestinians at IDF checkpoints, where Shamir shot the film between 2001 and 2003. His new documentary, whose working title is Flipping Out is, in a sense, a sequel to Checkpoint. Its protagonists are a small group of young Israeli men who, following their military service, set off for the Far East. For the young people whom Shamir will be following in Flipping Out, however, what has become an almost obligatory coming-of-age ritual in Israeli society turns into a personal nightmare when their journey to India is cut short by a bad "trip" following the ingestion of hallucinogenic drugs. "The film will follow, in real time, two or three guys who experience a psychotic breakdown and lose the ability to distinguish between reality and unreality," Shamir told The Jerusalem Post. ] Some victims of such breakdowns are traced by their families after they lose contact. In other cases, the families are alerted by their children's traveling companions. In some instances, a professional "rescuer" is involved in tracking them down or extricating them from Indian psychiatric hospitals or prisons, where they may have been treated with narcotics. The film will then continue to document the lives of these young people after they are brought back to Israel, while they are being treated in a special rehabilitation center for people suffering from similar symptoms. "It's a center that was created especially for young people who had psychotic experiences following drug use while traveling abroad," Shamir said. "It's an alternative to being hospitalized in a psychiatric ward." Shamir said that such psychotic breakdowns can be defined as a liminal state, which people can recover from and resume their normal functioning. According to the filmmaker, there are likely 2,000 people a year who return to Israel in a similar state. "It's hard to follow them," he said, "because sometimes their families try to take care of them themselves." Shamir said that while researching the film, he spent many hours in the rehabilitation center, where he realized that a very high percentage of the patients had been combat fighters during their military service. "It's a connection that cannot be discounted," Shamir said. According to Shamir, Checkpoint was about the impact that the occupation has had on both Israelis and on Palestinians. The numbers, he said, speak for themselves: there is a disproportionately large number of Israelis who suffer the dire effects of drug abuse in the Far East. "It's definitely a kind of post-traumatic reaction," he said. "We live in a very difficult existential reality, and when you leave the country the contrast between here and there is incredibly strong." Speaking on the phone Thursday while passing through newly created army barriers on the way to Gush Katif, where he is currently filming a TV documentary about the disengagement, Shamir would not specify how the experience of participating in the disengagement process might affect the next wave of travelers to the Far East. "It's certainly a situation that doesn't contribute to anyone's peace of mind," he said.
