ABSTRACT
Shortly after the June 1967 war, a book entitled Siah Lohamim appeared in Israel. It consisted of transcripts of tape-recorded discussions and interviews involving some 140 officers and soldiers, all kibbutz members. Mor Loushy, an Israeli filmmaker at the start of her career, learned about the book in graduate school. Loushy "spent eight months listening to 200 hours of the tapes", identifying the voices and tracking down the former soldiers, now men on the cusp of old age. In the finished 2015 film, Censored Voices, the technique employed by Loushy to bring tapes and veterans together is arresting. "The Israeli army", she writes, "censored the recordings, allowing only a fragment of the conversations to be published" in the book. That Loushy's film benefits from her narrative of "brutal" censorship goes without saying, and that narrative has been deployed relentlessly in the promotion of Censored Voices.
