BIRTHMAN — A Film by Itay Ganot

I wanted someone sitting in the dark, someone who believes that what happened to them has already decided the rest of their life, to leave with the possibility that another life can still be created.

That, for me, is why BIRTHMAN exists.

For many years, I have created and facilitated rituals in which creativity and the body become tools for profound human change. Hundreds of people have taken part. I was repeatedly asked why these experiences were not being documented and why others could not witness what happened there. I began to ask how cinema could open that experience to others. BIRTHMAN grew from that question and from a wish to make our capacity to begin again visible.

We are surrounded by images and stories of male violence. What we see far less often is a man choosing to confront the cycle he has inherited before it continues through him. Wolf chose to undertake that journey with the help of other men. I wanted to place another image of masculinity on the screen: men standing beside another man as he takes responsibility for his life and attempts to break a cycle of violence.

With extraordinary courage and imagination, Wolf attempted to emerge from profound darkness and create a different relationship with life. I wanted us to be present for that real experience, rather than to be told a story about change.

For a year, I prepared three days of filming in meticulous detail. Every frame was storyboarded, yet nothing inside those frames was rehearsed, repeated or reconstructed for the camera.

We have become accustomed to seeing human experience represented. For 71 minutes, I wanted to let us witness it directly. The film asks for no shared language, belief or ideology. It does not ask us to belong to anything, only to witness another human being.

We constructed the frame. What happened inside it belonged to life.